At last, some plans!
It has been a rather long story, the main hurdle being getting the plans through the Cambridge City Council Planning office. The story thus far:
Shortly after completing on the house last September, we hired Graham Riley of the Cambridge architectural firm Freeland Rees Roberts to design the extensions we had in mind for the house. The very first step was getting a survey done of the house. A couple of people came over and spent the day measuring every last bit of the house. The end result was precise architectural drawings of the current state of affairs. This also includes the elevations.
The main issues we want to address are:
The main changes we want to do, at the level of the large-scale geometry, are fairly standard. All the Victorian houses of this sort are essentially the same, up to questions of dimension. In the case of this house, the rear projection was exceptionally long, and there is space to build to the side, so that the width of the kitchen/dining area would be the same as the rest of the house. The other issue is a loft conversion, converting the attic into a usable bedroom. My intention is to use that space as a study, but if we sell the house, it should function as a useful bedroom. This seemed to me to be especially important. Houses in the UK are often priced based on bedrooms. Our intention is to remove a partition wall on the first floor between the two small bedrooms in the back, to get a larger useful space. In doing so, we lose a bedroom (or rather, a room more resembling a broom closet). The loft conversion would then keep the house at four bedrooms, and at the same time provide a hopefully peaceful space for me to work.
The design of the expanded kitchen area was fairly straightforward. Our original conception was that we would extend the kitchen starting from the back of the main part of the house. (This side extension is called a "side return".) However, Graham convinced us that would make the back room in the main part of the house rather dark and tunnel-like, and that the space would be more pleasant if we started the side return somewhat further back, leaving a courtyard area which would provide light to the main part of the house. Since we agreed to that proposal, I have seen many pictures of houses on the market which did not take such advice, and I think leaving a courtyard is the correct decision. This will still leave plenty of room for a more comfortable kitchen, a dining area, and some additional living space. Such living space should be particularly pleasant in the morning, as the view will be east-facing and a lot of sun comes in. Right now, it takes real effort to get to the back of the house (dodging the dining table), and the whole current design seems to be intended to prevent one from enjoying the back garden.
The design of the loft proved much more challenging. The attic space as it is currently is not particularly big, and there are a large number of regulations imposing geometric constraints on what can be done. The simple solution is to build a large dormer on the back of the house, as that will add significantly to available space. On the other hand, whatever we propose has to get through the planning office, and that is the most challenging aspect of the design process. Since the house is in a conservation area, the procedure is especially stringent. Six months of observing the treatment of other planning applications taught me that large dormers tend to be the biggest problem, and are best avoided if at all possible.
It soon became clear that these constraints were likely to be incompatible. One needs to have a certain amount of head height when the stairs come up into the loft room. Since the staircase to the loft would be parallel to the existing staircase, it would start in the center of the house and end at the eaves. Thus this necessitates a full box dormer, essentially having a flat roof coming back from the peak of the roof. Based on other such proposals made in the area, it seemed very unlikely to us that such a plan would pass. The back of the house, visible from a side street, would "read as if it was three stories," (standard language of planning officers turning down proposed plans for dormers). Nevertheless, the dormer seemed to be forced on us by geometric considerations.
This impasse was resolved by the decision to spend a bit of extra money and turn the stairs around. In doing so, the second flight of stairs would then arrive in the loft room underneath the peak, and there would be enough head height to satisfy regulations without building a huge dormer. However, without a large dormer, the space in the loft room would be fairly minimal. After some further discussion, Graham proposed that we raise the height of the roof. This entails rebuilding the roof, but given that part of the side wall of the house is going to have to be rebuilt anyway because of the bowing, it seems likely the roof would have to come off anyway, and then we might as well build a new roof.
Raising the height of the roof can itself be quite controversial. Such requests are routinely turned down in rows of terraced houses, because it will destroy the uniformity of the roofs. On the other hand, our house, while officially at the end of a terrace, is set back from the adjoining house. Our ridge line is higher than the adjoining house, but on the other hand considerably lower than the house on our other side. So Graham proposed raising the ridge line to match that of the higher house next door. At the same time, he suggested a dormer which fit well with the surrounding houses. Here are the proposed floor plans and the new elevations. These are the plans which were submitted to the planning office, and all the plans above are publically available on the city planning website.
Then came the waiting. There is a statutory eight week period; one needs to allow time for neighbours to comment, and so on and so forth. After the plans are received and put up on the planning website, public notices are put up nearby announcing the existence of a planning application, encouraging the public to comment. One of the pitfalls at this stage involves tiffs between neighbours, and the planning site is littered with nasty comments. Fortunately, we have good neighbours, our neighbours to the north even posted a positive comment. (Thanks, Anna and Roger!)
Surviving the planning period with no negative comments was a relief. But the crucial step was yet to come: an officer from the conservation department had to make a site visit, and make his or her report on how our proposed development would impact the conservation area. In general, this report does not have the final say in the matter, which is a good thing because almost no dormers are ever supported by conservation. Nevertheless, we felt that our plans were particularly sensitive to the surroundings, and we hoped it would be approved by conservation.
The site visit proceeded with little hint as to what the officer thought of the design, so this provoked a certain amount of anxiety. The report came quickly, however, and it was not positive. I have to say I was rather annoyed by various aspects of the report, but it was clear that the officer had identified one true potential problem with raising the ridge height as we proposed, namely that the slope of the roof would then be significantly different than those of the two adjacent houses. Much of the reasoning I found rather spurious. Many houses on the street do have different roof slopes. The phrase "the uniform use of slate (in itself significant of suburban expansion and the arrival of the railways, which facilitated the adoption of Welsh slate)" really gets to me. The fact is that most of these houses were built on the cheap by speculators in 1870s and narrowly avoided slum clearances. The intent seems to be to preserve these houses as a kind of museum for afficionados of 19th century rail and slate history. This view is simply not in touch with reality: it costs a great deal of money to maintain these houses, and for people to be willing to do so, they need to be able to function as houses in the twenty-first century. I am left feeling that conservation as presented in this report is an ideology, aiming to preserve a particular interpretation of history rather than doing what I feel conservation should be doing, namely preserving the attractiveness of the area. We tried to emulate the dormers at 144 to be sensitive to the context; this attempt seemed to be dismissed by the report simply by stating that that work had been approved before the current national planning framework came into force. In fact, in looking at many planning cases as we were trying to understand how to navigate the system, I began to feel that conservation demands often led to bad design decisions.
I could rant on about this. Nevertheless, we had to respond. We certainly didn't need to take the roof height all the way up to match 144, but we needed some additional height to make the design work. Graham suggested that we do it not by changing the slope of the roof in the front, but simply taking the roof further back and have a steeper slope in the back. This would still leave enough room for a proper bedroom. He quickly drew up revised plans and submitted them: it was pretty clear that if we didn't amend the plans, we would be rejected.
We then began waiting. Everyone went on vacation, and eventually the conservation officer had a look at the revised plans. He wrote a short report on the amended plans, which basically said he didn't mind the new proposed changes to the roof itself, but still didn't like the dormer. I was quite happy when I saw this, since my experience looking at planning applications suggested that conservations officers always object to the size of the dormer, and in most reasonable cases, these objections are ignored by the planning officer. So I was surprised when Graham told me the next day that the planning officer indicated that on the basis of the new report, she would reject our proposal.
This was rather frustrating. To Graham and myself, the dormer was well within the range of what was routinely approved. It wasn't even clear whether the planning officer would countenance another amendment. Her message seemed rather ominous: "I am offering you the opportunity to withdraw the application before I recommend refusal."
Generally speaking, it seems to be better to withdraw than be refused. Both mean starting from scratch, but a refusal sets a precedent. But I certainly did not want to start from scratch: this would mean another statutory two months, and we were now two weeks past the two month period as it was.
This seemed unnecessarily adversarial. A properly functioning system would encourage negotiation and dialogue, to arrive at a mutually agreeable design. I was not at all happy with the idea of a blanket refusal to consider further discussion, while the house itself continues to decay around us.
At this point, Graham suggested I contact my city councillor, Kevin Blencowe. Kevin has long experience with planning issues, and sits on the planning committee. Apparently, if a city councillor has concerns about a decision made by a planning officer, he or she can pull it to the committee, which has final say in the matter. For example, there had been a recent positive decision by a planning officer down the street which was reconsidered by the committee after a complaint of a neighbour, and the committee over-turned the planning decision.
After contacting Kevin, he very kindly suggested that he could come over to our house to discuss the plans and the planning issues. We set an appointment. Meanwhile, I had further discussions with Graham, and suggested that we try pulling the dormer in a little bit, fitting with another recently approved dormer. Graham updated the plans and sent these in. The planning officer was willing to look at the new plans, but we soon got another negative response. At that point we were very glad we had the upcoming appointment with Kevin, and felt that we had to stand our ground. Much more dominating dormers had been recently approved, and there really seemed to be no precedent for rejecting our design.
Kevin came by for almost an hour, studying the plans and explaining to us how the process works; he was extremely helpful, and gave me hope that things could be resolved. In particular, he promised to talk with the planning officer, and see if he could understand her thinking and open lines of communication.
The following week we got good news from Kevin: his conversation with the planning officer suggested that she had now changed her mind (for reasons that I guess we will never really understand) and was willing to approve the plans! This entailed more delay, however. Graham now had to draw up the details of the final plans, and then further waiting while the planning officer finally produced the report. Here are the final plans, and here is the report written by the planning officer..
In total, it was four months to the day between the submission of the plans and the approval. A frustrating time, but finally we could finally move on to the next stage.