Kitchen renovation in Stamford Brook

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

According to Hounslow’s appraisal, in 1898 the architect and surveyor J A Gill Knight took a lease of about 12 acres south of the common to build mansion flats and semi-detached houses for comfortably-off middle-class families and tenants. After the two listed houses came the mansion blocks of 1901 to 1905 and then the houses of 1907 to 1933. Stamford Brook station did not open until 1912, the appraisal adds, so building was not finished until after the First World War, and the railway and station border the conservation area to the south.

The appraisal credits the area’s elegant Edwardian character to the relationship between the common, the listed buildings, the mansion blocks and the family housing, and says scale and character have survived because the buildings have not had obtrusive extensions, alterations have been kept to a minimum and most front gardens remain. Among the further protections it lists are registration as Common Land and Local Open Space status, and it names Stamford Brook Common as a designated Local Open Space.

The name Stamford Brook belongs to a common, a road, an avenue and a District line station. None of these, and no W6 postcode, decides the council that handles an application, the line of a conservation boundary, a building’s listing or the consents a job requires. Hounslow says Stamford Brook Road and the houses on its north side are outside its borough, yet its own schedule includes The Brook at 27 Stamford Brook Road, and only 42–74 (even) and 47–99 (odd) Prebend Gardens are in its conservation area. The house or flat number is what counts. Check that number on the right council’s conservation area map, in the statutory list and against any Article 4 schedule; the title or lease and past planning decisions on the building complete the picture.

Local design and consent context

Hounslow designated the Stamford Brook Conservation Area on 13 January 1998, and its appraisal, consulted on in autumn 2019 and adopted by the council in January 2021, says the area had not been altered or extended since. The appraisal places it in the north-east part of Chiswick and explains that its eastern boundary is irregular because it partly follows an old ditch along the former parish boundary between Chiswick and Hammersmith. To the east lies Hammersmith and Fulham’s Ravenscourt and Starch Green Conservation Area.

The two Grade II houses in the Hounslow conservation area are The Brook on Stamford Brook Road, listed on 11 July 1951, and Stamford Brook House with its wall, on Stamford Brook Avenue, listed on 21 May 1973. Historic England describes The Brook as an eighteenth-century house of brown brick, originally two cottages, and records it as Lucien Pissarro’s home and studio from 1901 until his death in 1944; Hounslow’s appraisal says Stamford Brook House was built about 1743. Hounslow’s local list here is a cattle trough and two boundary markers.

Across the boundary, 9 and 11, 15, 17 and 19, and 21 and 23 Stamford Brook Road were listed Grade II on 14 February 1985. Historic England describes 9 and 11 as a mid-19th-century pair of semi-detached cottages and 17 to 23 as stuccoed semi-detached cottages with hipped slate roofs, and Hammersmith and Fulham’s character profile, approved in 1997, places them in the Ravenscourt and Starch Green Conservation Area. Separately, 5 and 7 and 2–10 (even) Stamford Brook Road and St Mary’s Court, a former church, appear in Hammersmith and Fulham’s Local Register of Buildings of Merit as it stood in August 2015. The council cautions that the directions and Buildings of Merit named in the profile are not the full set, and refers questions to its Urban Design and Conservation Team.

Access and site planning

Check which council manages the street before booking a skip or scaffold. In Hounslow, licences from Hounslow Highways are needed for scaffolding, hoarding, building materials, crane operations and skips, and a parking suspension must be applied for at least ten working days before the space is needed. On the Hammersmith and Fulham side, the skip firm, not the householder, applies for the skip licence, with 14 days as the shortest period; the scaffolding firm applies for the scaffold licence, which lasts at least a month; and parking bays can be suspended, up to six of them for up to three days, on eight days’ notice, counting Saturdays and Sundays.

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

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