Most of the money in a London renovation goes on things nobody sees: rewiring, plumbing, plastering, structural steel, making good after the trades. The visible finishes are usually a smaller share of the total than people expect. That’s useful to know, because it means the finish is the part you have the most control over, and where a few good decisions change how the whole house looks.
A full refurbishment that looks expensive is rarely one where every item was bought at the top of the range. It’s usually one where the money went into a handful of things you look at every day, the rest was kept plain, and the work underneath was done properly.
1. Put the money where the eye lands
If those are right, the room reads as good quality even when the rest is ordinary. If the budget is spread evenly across every item, the room tends to look fine and nothing more.
A practical way to do it is to stand in the doorway of each room on the drawings and decide what you’ll see first. That item gets the bigger share of the money for that room. A good worktop and a decent splashback will usually do more for a kitchen than upgrading the oven, the sink, the handles and the plinth lights all by a small amount.
Stone and quartz worktops also affect the programme. They’re templated once the base units are fitted and then cut to size, which usually takes one to two weeks. The kitchen can’t be finished until they’re in, so the order needs to go in early, and any changes to the units after templating mean a new top.
Spending more on fewer things is usually what makes a room look finished.
The other thing that matters is what’s underneath. A premium tile on a wall that isn’t flat will show every lump, and an expensive floor laid on an uneven subfloor will creak and gap. Plastering, levelling and setting out cost very little next to the materials going on top, and they’re what makes the materials look good.
Paint is the clearest example. The cheapest finish in the house is also the one most often let down by preparation. New plaster needs a thinned mist coat before anything else, and woodwork needs filling, sanding and decorator’s caulk along the joints. Two full coats of a mid-priced paint over good preparation will look better than one coat of an expensive brand over bad.
2. Don’t strip out what can be repaired
A lot of London houses still have their original joinery: four-panel doors, stair balusters, skirtings, cornices, fireplaces. On Victorian and Edwardian terraces there are often pine floorboards under the carpet in reasonable condition. Replacing these with new is expensive, and the new versions usually look flatter than the originals.
Old timber floors can normally be sanded, gaps filled with slivers and the boards re-finished for a fraction of the cost of a new engineered floor. Kitchens that are structurally sound can be repainted in situ with new handles and a new worktop. Sash windows are often blamed for draughts that a draught-proofing kit and new cords would fix. Old doors that stick can usually be eased and rehung, and joinery repairs to staircases or built-in cupboards cost much less than replacements made to match.
In some houses you don’t get the choice. If the building is listed, the Planning (Listed Buildings and Conservation Areas) Act 1990 puts the original fabric under control:
“no person shall execute or cause to be executed any works for the demolition of a listed building or for its alteration or extension in any manner which would affect its character as a building of special architectural or historic interest, unless the works are authorised under section 8.”
Planning (Listed Buildings and Conservation Areas) Act 1990, section 7(1)
The protection covers the inside as well as the outside, so taking out a fireplace, cornicing or original doors in a listed house without consent is a criminal offence, not a planning technicality. In a conservation area the controls are mostly external, but many London boroughs have Article 4 directions that remove permitted development rights for things like front windows, doors and boundary walls.
There’s also a tax angle on older houses. If a property has been empty for a long time, renovation work can carry VAT at the reduced rate of 5% instead of 20%. The condition is in the VAT Act:
“The first “empty home condition” is that neither— (a) the premises concerned, nor (b) where those premises are a building, or part of a building, which, when it was last lived in, formed part of a relevant residential unit, any of the other buildings that formed part of the unit, have been lived in during the period of 2 years ending with the commencement of the relevant works.”
Value Added Tax Act 1994, Schedule 7A, Group 7, Note 3(2)
In practice that means the house has to have stood empty for at least two years before work starts, and you need evidence of it, usually council tax records or utility bills. The reduced rate only applies to work and materials supplied by a VAT-registered contractor, so materials you buy yourself still carry 20%. On a large job the difference is significant, so it’s worth checking before the contract is signed.
The money saved by keeping what works can go where it’s needed more: better electrics, insulation, fitted storage or the worktop you actually wanted.
3. Use good materials in small amounts
Tiles are the clearest example. A handmade or patterned tile across every wall of a bathroom can cost more than the sanitaryware. The same tile on one shower wall or a single splashback, with a plain tile elsewhere, gives most of the effect for a fraction of the price. Fewer cuts on expensive tiles also means less waste, and patterned tiles waste more than plain ones because the pattern has to be matched.
Porcelain has largely replaced natural stone in London bathrooms and kitchens for this reason. It’s cheaper, doesn’t need sealing, and the better stone-effect ranges are hard to tell apart from marble at normal viewing distance. Engineered oak boards look the same as solid oak once laid and cope better with underfloor heating. Quartz offcuts from a stone yard can be enough for a vanity top or a small utility worktop.
The number of materials matters as much as their price. A room with one tile, one timber tone, one metal finish and one wall colour usually looks calmer and more expensive than one with five finishes competing. In smaller London flats and terraces that’s even more true, because you can see most of the room from any point in it.
Order samples and look at them together in the room, in daylight and under the lights you’re going to fit. Colours that match in a showroom often don’t in a north-facing back room. Paint does the same, and a white can look grey in one room and yellow in the next. This is easier to get right at the planning stage than once the tiler is on site waiting for a decision.
4. Lighting, switches and handles
Lighting changes how a room looks more than almost anything else for the money. A single ceiling pendant in the middle of a room lights the floor and leaves the corners dark. Most rooms work better with a mix: general light, task light over worktops and desks, and lower light from wall fittings or lamps in the evening.
The cheap part is planning it before the plasterer arrives. Running cables for wall lights, under-cabinet strips or a lamp circuit on its own switch costs little when the walls are open and a lot once they’re decorated. Dimmers are inexpensive and make a bigger difference to the feel of a room than the choice of fitting. Colour temperature matters too. Warm white around 2700K reads as a home; 4000K and above reads as an office.
Electrical work in a house is covered by the Building Regulations:
“Reasonable provision shall be made in the design and installation of electrical installations in order to protect persons operating, maintaining or altering the installations from fire or injury.”
Building Regulations 2010, Schedule 1, Part P1
Adding a new circuit, replacing the consumer unit, or altering a circuit in a bathroom is notifiable work. It has to be done by an electrician registered with a competent person scheme, or signed off by building control, and you should get an electrical installation certificate at the end. Buyers’ solicitors ask for these when you sell.
Switches, sockets and handles work the same way as lighting. Plastic switch plates next to expensive wallpaper look out of place, while a consistent metal finish on switches, sockets and door handles through the house costs a few hundred pounds more on a typical job. Brushed brass, black and stainless all work, as long as one finish is used throughout rather than a mix.
5. Keep the house consistent
The houses that look most expensive tend to repeat themselves. The same floor runs through the ground floor. The same handles appear on every door. The paint colours come from one palette. Nothing in one room looks like it came from a different house.
This also saves money. One floor ordered in a single batch is cheaper per square metre, cuts down offcuts and avoids threshold strips at every doorway. One handle and hinge finish means one order. Fewer design decisions also means fewer changes on site, and changes are where budgets usually go wrong, because work already done has to be taken out again.
On a London terrace the narrow rooms are the main reason to carry one floor through. A continuous floor from the front door to the back makes the ground floor look longer, while changing material at every doorway breaks it into small boxes.
Setting a few rules at the start, such as one floor, one metal, one white for woodwork, makes the later decisions easier. Most of the questions that come up halfway through a job already have an answer.
Joinery profiles matter more than people expect in an older house. Victorian skirtings, architraves and picture rails come in a handful of standard mouldings, such as torus and ogee. When a wall is moved or a room is extended, new skirting in a different profile is easy to spot. Joinery workshops can run short lengths to match an existing profile, which costs less than replacing a whole floor’s worth to make it consistent.
A bit of history
The Georgian terraces of central London look the way they do partly because of fire law. After the Great Fire of 1666, a series of London Building Acts controlled how houses were built. The 1709 Act required window frames to be set back from the face of the brickwork, and the 1774 Act went further and required sash boxes to be hidden behind the brick reveal, to stop fire spreading up the timber. The deep, plain window reveals people now pay to restore came from a fire regulation.
Wallpaper had its own problem. From 1712 until 1836 it was taxed in Britain, and the paper had to carry an excise stamp to show the duty was paid. The stamps can still be seen on the back of surviving fragments in museum collections.
Where the budget usually goes wrong
The pattern is the same on most jobs that overspend. Decisions are left until the trade needs them, so things get chosen in a hurry, and something better or more expensive gets picked because there’s no time to compare. Items get upgraded one at a time, each upgrade looking small on its own. Then the hidden work turns out bigger than expected, often old wiring or rotten joists under a bathroom, and there’s no contingency left.
A contingency of around 10 to 15% of the build cost is normal for an older London house. Making the finish choices before work starts and keeping them to a small, repeated set protects that contingency, and it’s also what gives the house the consistent, considered look that people usually mean by high-end.
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