More Upstairs Space Without Raising the Roof

The house at Western Road had reached a point familiar to many older homes: it was tired, it was inefficient, and it was working against the people living in it. Downstairs, a jumble of spaces broken up by small windows made the interior feel darker and more cramped than the footprint warranted. Upstairs was worse; sloping ceilings bearing down on the bedrooms, a collection of mismatched dormer windows of different sizes, and a roofline that made the upper floor feel like an afterthought rather than a proper part of the home.
The clients needed generous, usable bedroom and bathroom space. They needed the house to perform to modern energy standards. And they needed a coherent exterior that presented itself with confidence rather than looking like something that had accumulated piecemeal over the decades.
The central design problem was this: how do you create full-height ceilings and proper bedrooms upstairs without the cost, complexity and planning implications of raising the maximum roofline.

A Flat Roof, Stained Larch and Generous New Windows

The answer was elegant in its logic. By replacing the existing pitched and dormered roof with a clean flat roof, Simon Mack Architecture was able to raise the internal ceiling height of the upper floor significantly, creating large, properly proportioned bedrooms, without raising the maximum height of the building at all. The flat roof solved the problem precisely and efficiently, and it transformed the exterior in the process.
Gone were the mismatched dormers and the broken roofline. In their place, a streamlined upper storey clad in striking stained larch timber, warm, characterful and contemporary, sits above a crisp white rendered ground floor. The two materials work together with a clarity and confidence that the original house entirely lacked. The proportions are resolved; the elevation reads as a composed, considered whole.
The new windows are generously sized grey-framed picture windows, aligned carefully across the elevation so that they line up cleanly outside, reinforcing the sense of order and calm. They flood the bedrooms with natural light and, from the street, give the house an assured, modern character.
The refurbishment went beyond the aesthetic. The entire building was thoroughly re-insulated and re-glazed to meet modern energy efficiency standards, future-proofing the home against rising energy costs and making it a genuinely comfortable place to live throughout the year. Easy access to the garden was maintained and improved at ground floor level, keeping the connection between inside and outside that gives the house much of its appeal.

Light, Space and a Clean, Unfussy Home

Western Road is a project that shows what a complete, well-considered refurbishment can achieve. The upper floor, once the weakest part of the house, is now its strongest: large bedrooms with full-height ceilings, generous windows and ample bathroom space, rooms that feel like rooms rather than cramped spaces borrowed from a roof void.
The exterior is transformed. The stained larch and white render give the house a confident, contemporary identity without straining for effect. The aligned windows, clean lines and resolved proportions do the work quietly.
Internally, the design is simple and unfussy, spaces that are easy to live in, well lit, easy to heat, and easy to enjoy. This is what a thoughtful refurbishment should deliver: a home that works properly for the people who live in it, built to last and designed to age well.