A problem shared: enterprising London neighbours team up to extend their homes — and save thousands of pounds

When neighbours join forces to improve their homes it all gets a lot easier: no planning objections, less mess and huge savings. 
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Philippa Stockley22 February 2019

Londoners are great at making the most of space or extending it further, and the benefits are usually huge. But the flipside of that can be getting bogged down in time-wasting, depressing arguments with neighbours over the plans; or in costly party wall agreements, or with rules about the height of a new boundary wall — which can be as low as two metres.

Greek architect Sofia Kapsalis and her Danish husband Soren Krautwald, a software engineer, heard in 2016 that their Walworth neighbours, both architects, planned to build a cute office at the end of their garden and enlarge their house sideways and outwards at the back. This would involve springing a new section of roof across from a newly built wall between the two houses.

After a lengthy application, the neighbours got planning permission. Sofia and Soren were immediately interested but not, as you might think, to object about being overseen, or about loss of light in their already narrow and quite dark side return.

Sofia had the brainwave of seizing the opportunity to share the new brick wall her neighbour planned to build and use it to put glass across her own side return. Glassing in the side return was something she and Soren had been thinking about, but here was the trigger they needed to make it happen.

Seize the chance: when architect Sofia Kapsalis’s neighbours extended their house, she agreed with them that she would use the newly built wall to glass over her side return and expand her kitchen-diner in a bright, stunning way
Juliet Murphy

Sofia, 47, and Soren, 44, had lived in their house since 2007, with their two children, Max, now 11, and Eva, seven. Before that, they’d been in a flat where they could hardly get the baby buggy through the door, so when Max was a year old, enough was enough. They spotted and bought a Victorian terrace house divided into two flats, which Sofia saw at once could be easily converted back to a family home.

The ground floor layout was dreadful: five rooms in a line next to a wonky corridor by the stairs. Sofia transformed that floor by straightening the corridor to get a through-view to the garden, joining the two front rooms with a big doorway and knocking the two back rooms into one, creating a big kitchen-diner looking out to the garden through a glass bay.

In this new room she ran a swish white kitchen down one side, with a seven metre-long concrete worktop, cast on site. But she always thought about glassing over the unused side return, when funds allowed.

When the neighbours announced their plan, Sofia asked them round. The couples gathered around her kitchen table and started sketching. Because three of them were architects, they knew that if they shared the wall they could build it higher than the maximum the planners had passed; escape having to sort out pesky party wall agreements; dig their drains together and basically save money all round. That’s what you call a win-win-win.

To put this mutual advantage into financial context, Sofia’s builder said that if she glassed over her side return on her own, paying all the costs, then the work without glass, which is often the most expensive part, would be about £50,000. If she did it with her neighbour, it would be £30,000.

What it cost

  • Victorian terrace 1,925sq ft house in 2007: £595,000
  • First phase of internal building works in 2007: £150,000
  • Second phase of building in 2016: £50,000 (including glazing)
  • Value now (estimate): £1.25 million
  • Costs exclude professional fees, interiors and landscaping

Working together also meant the couples could use their shared back garden for storing building materials. Because David, the neighbour, was planning a lot of work, he didn’t mind most of the rubble and waste being carted out through his property, whereas, since Sofia and Soren had already done their first phase and their house was in good condition, they were glad to avoid trashing it by repeatedly carting rubble through it.

That lovely straight hall played an ace, too, because the long building steels that both houses needed could be brought straight through, instead of being either cut up or craned over the rooftops at vast expense. In fact, most building materials came in that way.

Each, in other words, was happy to help their neighbour. They set to work. Sofia’s build looks deceptively straightforward. She knocked out the old side wall, and so did her neighbour. They all saved their bricks and combined them into the new, strong wall. Where her old side wall had been, Sofia put in what looks like a goalpost of steel, eight inches thick and painted yellow, then put glass across it and down each end, mounted in super-thin aluminium. The glass springs off the new wall.

In simple terms, it’s just a glassed box on the side. But simple is almost always good and the addition completely changes the light and space in this most important room in the house

One of the most remarkable things is that each couple now has a tiny courtyard at the back of the side return, visible through the back glazed end — and since they are good friends, they left these spaces connected, like a magical passage — with a locking door, of course. The children absolutely adore it.

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