Extension in Olney

​

Mr and Mrs Collins had been considering altering and extending their house for some time when they contacted us. Like most of our clients, they had never embarked on anything like this before and were unsure how to proceed or how the process worked.

 

They chose to call us because we were members of the Buy With Confidence scheme, and also liked our website, so have put their minds at rest we proceeded with a feasibility scheme. The brief was to provide a family space adjacent to the kitchen so that they could have those most meaningful of moments with their grandchildren. This has become the most asked-for requirement over the last ten years, and yet so few houses adequately offer this.

​

This Victorian house had no bathroom upstairs and hardly let in any natural light. Even though the house had been extended before to create more room; it resulted in limiting the amount of light even further. Houses of this era usually don’t provide enough space for larger families, therefore an additional bathroom was essential.

​

Extending a small cottage with so many requirements is always a challenge because it would be easy to lose the cottage feel which would have been a shame. All the way through the early design process, we appraise the design and give feedback to ensure that the evolving design will meet building regulation requirements, can be built without undue complication, and will be acceptable to the planning authorities. This latter aspect is always a subjective call but having over 90% success rate with planning applications; we believe that our experience and constant throughput help with this.

​

It was the most memorable moment when on arrival to photograph the finished project we were met by our beaming clients who were now used to visitors being blown away by the changes to their house. We were pretty amazed, I confess.