Who lives here?
This gothic Victorian property belongs to Sebastien, who lives here with his three daughters.

What was the aim of the project?
Seb came to Resi with the aims of extending the kitchen/dining area, opening up the kitchen to create access to the garden, increasing the size of the windows for extra light and generally making the space larger, brighter and more energy efficient throughout. The property spans four floors and hadn't had any renovation work done in a really long time. Seb loved the house but improvements were needed as parts of the house were very old, particularly the kitchen which was dark and poorly insulated. The house itself is beautiful and Grade II listed, situated on a quiet leafy road in a Conservation Area.

So, what did we change?
We renovated the house and extended the back at basement level, opening up the previously cold and dark kitchen into a much more spacious kitchen/dining area, with bifold doors to flood the space with natural light and provide access out into the garden, where we built a patio area with steps that lead up into the garden which sits at ground level.

What did Seb find useful about doing his project with Resi?
If I had done the project which I had wanted to do, I would have failed. I thought about it all wrong. The project is a success but is different to what I initially planned.

I used a builder introduced to me by Resi Connect. The builder included a Project Manager and I think that's 90% of the reason why things went so well. The Project Manager made sure everyone on site was doing the right thing. It was a bit more expensive, around 10-15% more than the others, but totally worth it for the trust and the peace of mind. And there were no bad economic surprises in the end, we didn't go over the quote at all.

The house is listed and in a Conservation Area, and the council are slow to respond and often unhelpful. Trying to navigate the council on your own feels impossible, so I appreciated having experts who knew how to manage and navigate this for me.

Looking back on the project, what would Seb have done differently?
I didn't anticipate how much of a disruption the construction would be! I thought I could just wall off the downstairs and stay upstairs but the noise was so bad, there was dust absolutely everywhere and the house was freezing. I probably should have moved out temporarily during the worst of it!

Photography by Matt Gamble.