The brief
A terrace to be refurbished throughout, with a proper communal kitchen and a separate living space rather than the single shared room most refurbishments in this bracket end up with.
Back-to-brick renovations · Oxford Road, ST4
Back-to-brick renovation — Oxford Road, ST4
A terrace refurbished around a communal kitchen and living space people actually use
- Location
- Oxford Road, ST4
- 1
- Shared kitchen and living space
The challenge
Fitting a genuine kitchen, a breakfast bar and a separate seating area into a standard terrace ground floor without any of the three feeling like an afterthought.
The result
A ground floor with a full kitchen, a breakfast bar and a separate sitting area with a wall-mounted television.
What we actually did
The communal space
The thing that separates a decent house share from a bedsit with shared plumbing is having somewhere to sit that isn’t your bed.
The ground floor here does three jobs: a kitchen with full-size appliances, a breakfast bar for the everyday eating that actually happens, and a separate seating area with a wall-mounted television.
Most refurbishments in this bracket get one shared room and call it done. Splitting it costs almost nothing at the layout stage and makes a visible difference to how quickly the rooms let.
The kitchen specification
Olive green shaker doors, metro tiling, stone-effect worktops and herringbone flooring running through from the hall.
The full-size American fridge freezer isn’t a luxury — a full household doing separate weekly shops needs the volume, and the alternative is a second fridge in the corner of a room that was supposed to be for sitting in.
Light down the hall
Terraces of this type have a long, dark central hall. The arched mirror at the end of the kitchen isn’t only decorative — it throws daylight from the kitchen window back down towards the front door, which is the cheapest way to fix a problem that’s otherwise structural.
More recent work
All projects
13-bed HMO conversion — The Freebird, ST5
A former pub being converted into thirteen letting rooms — steels, propping and structural alterations
- Status
- On site now
5-bed HMO conversion — Oxford Road, ST4
A bay-fronted terrace taken to first fix and rebuilt as five en-suite rooms
HMO conversion — Etruria Road
A dated family house turned into letting rooms with a communal kitchen
Next step
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