Extension and refurbishment

Originally a tired mid-century bungalow, this property hadn’t seen much updating in at least 40 years. The new owners approached Tom Spriggs Architect Ltd to take them through a briefing process, a sketch scheme option exercise and develop a design. The brief was to increase the size of the building to include a live-in and open plan kitchen-diner. We developed a few options on how this could be achieved and settled on moving the kitchen and dining rooms to the west end of the building forming a ‘T’ shape on plan. This gave a good improvement with the bedrooms also, and crucially allowed the build to be completed in phases, which a roof extension upwards might not have.

At one end of the ‘T’ a new north-facing porch and utility room, the other; a large south facing window illuminating the dining table overlooking the garden. By moving the original kitchen and dining room, and the entrance to the building, it resolved a poor public-to-private hierarchy and gave a better driveway relationship.

Bungalows usually suffer from poor public-to-private hierarchy, in that you have to walk past bedrooms to get to the kitchen, dining or bathroom. Unlike terraces or houses with stairs and vertical circulation, on a bungalow it is often quite simple to move the front door – sometimes it can really improve their relation to their gardens too, as many are sited centrally on the plot. Here by adding a new proper porch, we tackled all the issues of coat and shoe storage, and solved the circulation problems in one go. The house now has a semi-public kitchen, dining, and lounge area, with a door off to the bedrooms and bathrooms, almost forming a separate ‘wing’.

After securing planning permission a set of detailed drawings were prepared for the builders to price and construct from. Included in the works was a renovation of the whole building, including roofing, insulation, solar panels, windows and doors, heating and plumbing, electrics, new bathrooms and of course the two storey extension.