A House with a Hidden Steel

Rear Extension and Renovation in Maida Vale

Borough: City of Westminster

Service: Technical Design and Build

We took over the technical design and build of a rear glass extension on this four-storey house on Elgin Avenue, close to Little Venice and Paddington Recreation Ground. The brief from the client was straightforward: a glazed addition that opened the back of the house to the garden, with a living wall to soften the transition between inside and out.

The first job was working with engineers to check whether the existing structure could carry the new glass panels. There were no drawings for the house, no build records, and nobody left who remembered how it had gone together. Four exploratory holes in the plasterboard turned up nothing. The fifth finally exposed a steel beam with the original contractor’s name stamped into it, and that one clue led  our architect through a chain of phone calls to the site manager, then the original structural engineer, and eventually a set of hand-drawn plans from the early 2000s. Our full blog on what went down is here.

With the structure understood, the extension went ahead exactly as designed: full-length glazing opening the reception room onto the rear terrace, with the living wall running alongside it. Elsewhere in the house, the layout keeps things practical, with a kitchen and dining area at the centre of the plan and a walk-in wardrobe and en-suite off the main bedroom, all set behind gated off-street parking at the front.

It’s a reminder that most extensions start with a simple brief and a few unknowns behind the plasterboard, and that solving those unknowns properly is half the job.