Builders in Chelsea, SW3

Chelsea’s stock runs from early Georgian terraces around the older streets to Victorian red-brick mansion flats and the tall stucco terraces near Sloane Square. Plots are narrow and deep, houses are typically four or five storeys including a lower ground floor, and almost the entire area sits within a conservation area with permitted development rights restricted.

The defining project is the full refurbishment: stripping a house back, reworking the lower ground and ground floors into usable family space, renewing services throughout, and rebuilding the finishes to a high specification. Because the houses are tall and narrow, the work is vertical — everything moves through a single staircase, which governs how the programme is built and why sequencing matters more here than square footage does.

Basement and lower ground floor work is common but heavily regulated. The Royal Borough restricts basement excavation to a single storey under most properties and limits the proportion of garden that can be built under, and any excavation near a neighbour’s foundations triggers notice under the Party Wall etc. Act 1996. In a terrace with party walls on both sides, that usually means two sets of notices, two surveyors and an agreed schedule of condition before a spade goes in the ground.

Period fabric rewards a considered specification. Solid brick walls with no cavity, lime plaster, original sash windows and softwood joinery all behave differently to modern equivalents, and insulating or heating them as though they were a new build causes condensation and decay. Where original features are being retained, protecting them properly during strip-out is always cheaper than replicating them afterwards.