Bespoke joinery in Soho

Fitted storage, cabinetry and the room around it.

Start with the bespoke joinery brief

Start with what the furniture needs to hold and how you use the room. Record alcoves, ceiling heights, skirtings, sockets and radiator positions before setting cabinet depths or door swings. Keep the details worth retaining in the measured brief.

Agree internal layouts, lighting, ventilation, hardware and finish samples before manufacture. Drawings should show how new joinery meets uneven walls and existing cornices, and how access for installation will work.

The local building context

Westminster’s Soho and Chinatown Conservation Area Audit calls Soho London’s most central village and a strongly residential area. It records that no great estates existed here for two hundred years, so buildings were rebuilt piecemeal and consistent terraces are few, yet narrow 17th- and early 18th-century plots still predominate. The Georgian buildings, in red brick or yellow London stock, are no more than four storeys, sometimes with a mansard storey or a London roof behind a parapet cornice.

On Shaftesbury Avenue and Charing Cross Road, both of the 1880s, tall red-brick buildings have commercial premises on the ground floor with apartments or offices above, and there are blocks of mansion flats. The audit notes that Westminster Council built tall blocks of flats in the 1960s, but that residents are more likely to live in refurbished older properties, and that Soho Housing Association was set up in 1973 by people living in Soho.

Uniform groups are rare; the audit singles out listed Georgian terraces in Broadwick, Lisle and Meard Streets. Historic England lists Nos 1 to 7 (odd) Meard Street, of about 1732 by John Meard with fully panelled interiors, and Nos 13 to 21 (odd), three storeys with basements and dormered mansards, both at Grade II*. The House of St Barnabas, a corner house on Soho Square at 1 Greek Street, is Grade I and keeps mid-18th-century Rococo decoration inside.

Local design and consent context

The audit’s policy references predate the current framework, and the council says adopted audits should be read alongside its adopted policies; City Plan Policy 45E is now the roof policy. Paragraph 24.11 of the City Plan still has Soho proposals assessed against the audit, which finds that many unlisted Georgian buildings already have mansards, so upward extension of many buildings is unlikely to be acceptable. Its roof map, Figure 21, rests on a 2004 street-level survey.

Westminster’s other directions cover changing commercial, business and service premises into homes in parts of the city, checked by address; in Soho they could matter if a ground-floor shop were to become a flat, but not for work inside an existing home. The council’s minor-alteration directions with a stated address all lie outside Soho. Listing, the conservation area and the lease still bind you whatever the Article 4 position, and flats have no householder rights in the first place.

Under Policy 50, a basement in a listed building must not unbalance the original hierarchy of spaces. The May 2026 Code of Construction Practice classes every new or extended basement, whatever its size, as Level 3, which requires a Construction Management Plan. Historic England’s 2017 appraisal puts Soho, between Regent Street, Shaftesbury Avenue, Charing Cross Road and Oxford Street, in a Tier 2 archaeological priority area, and groundwork applications there need a desk-based assessment.

Access and site planning

Walk the delivery path from the pavement to the room, through any shared street door and up a narrow stair or lift. Westminster licenses skips for a month at a time; one in a parking bay also needs a bay suspension, booked 10 working days ahead, and one on a yellow line a dispensation. Scaffolds and hoardings need a temporary structure licence. TfL licenses Oxford Street itself and considers skips there only in rare cases; check TfL’s map for any other frontage.

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The Soho area guide · Bespoke joinery across London · Hampstead Architecture & Planning · Hampstead Chartered Surveyors

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