Category: Design

When we bought our small terraced home in 2007, little did we know that 10 years later we would have successfully extended and converted it into 4 flats.

It has been a long, transformative, arduous, educational, profitable and ultimately uplifting process…

The site always had potential but it took some creative design to enable 4 viable flats on a very tight site. There was also quite a battle with the local planning authority who were fantastically unhelpful – and wrong! as proved when they were forced to accept the obvious merits of our case by the Planning Inspectorate at appeal.

Then there was the credit crunch mess of cowboy banks gambling too much (of taxpayers’ money) and then too little (to protect their bonuses?!). I will never forget one large lender withdrawing from the market telling me they were unwilling to lend for our flats in Surrey as flats were risky because “there are lots of unsold flats in central Manchester”! Words fail.

Then a widely recommended builder promptly went bust days before starting, leaving us with no option but to self-build to beat a fast-looming planning deadline. Later, the water company managed to dig up the footpath 7 times before getting it right and we had to synthesise and redraw 6 contradictory electrical supply technical plans from the statutory supplier into one definitive drawing which they immediately approved. So, not always easy.

On the positive side, it has brought a huge breadth and depth of hands-on knowledge, a tremendous feeling of satisfaction, a healthy profit and a fantastic contribution to the community and its housing stock within 10 yards of a busy London commuter railway station. Within days of launch an airline pilot and young couple wanted to move in, with many more viewings being booked. Neighbours and a local housebuilder have stopped by to congratulate and thank us on a job well done to improve the area. The first building directly opposite anyone leaving the railway station is now not a dilapidated eyesore but a bright, transformed development to welcome and lift the spirits of travellers.

I am glad now to have more time to spend on Zollikon Architecture again – and with much enhanced knowledge. Despite, or perhaps because of, the countless obstacles met and overcome through sheer bloody-minded hard work over years, the flats project will remain a source of pride (and hopefully income) for many years to come.

An artist selling inspirational artwork in Covent Garden recently reminded me of some powerful words by President Theodore Roosevelt:

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

It still strikes a chord as I read it now. Thankfully, we met every defeat, and every armchair critic, with a victory.