Kitchen renovation in Totteridge

Plan the kitchen around movement, storage and services.

Start with the kitchen renovation brief

Map preparation, cooking, washing and storage before choosing cabinet fronts. Measure clearances with doors and drawers open, and decide which existing walls, floors and details belong in the finished room.

Coordinate the cabinetry with water, drainage, extraction, electrics and lighting. Confirm appliance dimensions and access for installation before the layout is signed off; structural alterations need their own design and approval checks.

The local building context

The appraisal attributes several houses to named architects: Norman Shaw for Trevanion and Ellern Mede, Charles Nicholson for The Grange and The Vicarage, and T.E. Collcutt for The Croft, Fairspeir and The Lynch House. Totteridge Lane was built up between 1884 and 1914 with neoclassical houses set back in large secluded gardens, and Totteridge Green keeps two listed 17th-century timber-framed farmhouses, Laurel Farm and Home Farm. The warm red of clay brick and tile is the most prevalent colour, some older buildings carry soft lime render, and most buildings after the mid-19th century are roofed in Welsh slate.

Around St Andrew’s Church, built about 1790 and of yellow brick with a slate roof, Totteridge Village has larger listed houses, including Totteridge House, a late 18th-century red brick villa, Southernhay, an early 19th-century stucco villa, and The Priory, a 17th-century Jacobean mansion, with a close-set group of modest, mainly 19th-century buildings to the west. Weatherboarded cottages such as No. 51 Totteridge Village have clay-tiled roofs, small timber porches and picket fences. Pine Grove and Northcliffe Drive hold large detached interwar and post-war houses in deep, narrow plots, and Lime Grove mainly chalet-type bungalows.

Neither the name Totteridge nor an N20 postcode tells you which council decides, whether a home is inside the conservation area or the Green Belt, whether it is listed, which Article 4 direction applies or which consent route the work takes. Barnet’s conservation map marks the borough boundary as well as the conservation boundary, so confirm the council with the official lookup, then read that map, the list entry, the Article 4 orders and their mapped areas, the title or lease and the planning history of the property itself.

Local design and consent context

In 2008 the appraisal counted 48 listed buildings, none at Grade I, and 24 locally listed buildings, among them the Orange Tree public house; local listing brings no statutory protection, although local policy then sought to preserve or enhance these buildings. It also identifies unlisted ‘positive’ buildings and says an application to demolish one needs a reasoned justification similar to that for a listed building. Ask Barnet whether a building is on its current local list.

Barnet’s order, A4D11, was made on 7 September 1970 and approved on 5 July 1972; later schedules approved in 1974 and 1979 cover porches, vehicle hard standings, oil tanks for domestic heating and gates, fences and walls, and the 1979 schedule also covers painting external walls. Planning data maps the direction as three areas and lists the rights it withdraws: enlargement and alteration, roof alterations, porches, outbuildings, hard surfaces, chimneys and flues, antennas, boundaries, access to a highway and exterior painting.

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The Totteridge area guide · Kitchen renovation across London · Hampstead Architecture & Planning · Hampstead Chartered Surveyors

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