Our clients wanted to fully renovate their late Victorian terraced home and to add a contemporary extension to the rear. The general renovation included a new kitchen, a new bathroom & shower room and the general sympathetic refurbishment of the interiors. The front facade, unlike the rest of the street, except the immediate neighbour, did not have a bay window, presumed to be because it was originally built as a shop. This was to have a new bay window added and have the old render removed to expose & restore the original London stock brickwork. The extension was clad & roofed in black Accoya timber, an innovative use of the material.
In reality, parts of the rear of the original house were found to be structurally unsound, so we ended up re-building the most of it. Even more challenging was the front elevation. Once the original render was removed, we found the reason why the house was so different from most of its neighbours – WW2 bomb damage had blown off the original Ground Floor bay window projection and had caused so much damage that much of facade had been hastily and poorly re-built. This required the temporary supporting of the structure from foundations to roof level and the strengthening of the facade. The facade was then finished with yellow stock brick slips to achieve the originally planned appearance.