Planning a house extension? How to get it right first time

If you are intending to extend your house in the near future and are not sure where to start, then have a read of my new help guide.

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This guide is the culmination of nearly 30 years of hard-won experience and the uber-important, invisible ‘forensic’ work that I always do before starting the design and drawings. It’s never a case of just banging out a few lines on a screen; there is a load of invisible risk reduction work going on behind the scenes.

Utilising my comprehensive house extension guide that homeowners can trust, is a brilliant way to ensure project success before spades hit the ground – or, rather, before those spades hit a buried sewer you should have known about before starting to dig !

What’s inside the free guide?

I’ve packed a massive amount of practical advice into this resource. Here are just some of the things I touch on:

• Preparation: Selecting the right team for your project

• Key statutory legislation: What you need to be aware of legally

• Reducing risks: Initial surveys, site investigations, neighbours, and building contractors

• Aesthetics: To match in with the existing style or go for something completely different

• Sustainability: Demolition, the new extension, and the existing host building

• Energy: Renewable sources of energy

• Existing drainage: What’s below ground and how it could affect what you build above ground

• Glazing: Key considerations for glass, how much is too much ?

• + loads more!

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From a webinar to a fully fledged ebook

This help guide originally came about after I presented a Skillshare webinar to fellow SPAB members [The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings] about extending old houses and how to do it the right way.

Despite feeling like a bit of a hassle at the time because I was already plenty busy, preparing for it helped me frame my own approach to designing and extending old buildings, so it was actually quite helpful.

I then repurposed the SPAB presentation slides into a multi-month series of helpful guidance posts across LinkedIn. Now, I’ve taken it a step further to create a definitive, 38-page house extension guide renovators can use as a step-by-step reference.

I edited and updated all the original content and enlisted the help of a pro graphic designer [my brother, Simon Oliver] to give it a sleek, polished look. It’s now a ‘proper’, fully interactive publication available via my website as a free downloadable resource, making it incredibly easy to navigate.

The great design debate: matching vs. contemporary contrast

In the ebook, I also touch on the SPAB approach of ‘Good new design to complement the old…’

Personally, I prefer to design new extensions to old buildings with a contrasting and contemporary style of architecture, rather than a “matchy-matchy” design that tries to fake the original host building. As long as the extension fits in sensitively, the scale is proportionate [not too bulky or dominant], and it’s not trying to compete unduly with the host building, a modern contrast can be done really well and will beautifully complement the historic structure.

Crikey, looking back at the original SPAB presentation link, it turns out that webinar was just over 3 years ago – time flies!

Over to you: what’s your preferred style?

Switching this up now – what do you think? Should a 21st-century extension to an old building be of a modern, contrasting design or a matching, traditional design? Why do you think that? Send me a message via the contact page and let me know, I’d love to hear what you think. I will read any messages and I will reply.

I’ve done it both ways over the years, as I’ll always try to accommodate my Clients’ wishes. If you do want me to design a matchy-matchy extension, my philosophy is that it should look like it was always there.