Renovating Victorian homes for modern living

Victorian houses are stronger architecturally than almost anything built since. The ceilings are higher, the bones are more generous, the windows are taller. The challenge of renovating one is not the architecture. It is the way modern life wants to use the rooms.

Most Victorian terraces had a small back kitchen and a separate scullery. Modern life wants a single kitchen-diner-living. The standard move is a side-return extension that absorbs the scullery and the original kitchen into one room and adds a roof lantern for daylight. The bespoke kitchen lives along the original wall; the island runs parallel under the lantern.

The chimney breast. The picture rail. The fireplace surrounds. The original windows where they exist. The skirting profile. A Victorian renovation that removes all of these arrives at a generic open-plan box. One that keeps them arrives at a Victorian house with a modern kitchen, which is what the brief was.

Modern services — underfloor heating, recessed downlights, integrated audio — work brilliantly in Victorian houses because the floor and ceiling voids are usually generous. The trick is to integrate them invisibly. The pendants and wall lights should look like the only lighting; the underfloor heating should never be discussed.

Victorian walls are rarely plumb. Victorian floors are rarely level. A flat-pack kitchen will fight every centimetre. A bespoke kitchen designed for the room — drawn from a millimetre measure-up, built in the workshop, scribed on site — accommodates the imperfections without showing them.

The principal bedroom in a Victorian terrace is typically the room over the front parlour. It has a chimney breast and two alcoves. The standard renovation either ignores the alcoves or fills them with shelves. The bespoke renovation builds floor-to-ceiling cabinetry into both alcoves, scribed around the picture rail, finished in the same paint as the wall. The cabinetry disappears; the storage triples.

We do not build bathrooms ourselves but we frequently coordinate around them. The bathroom in a Victorian home wants the same logic as the bedroom: cabinetry that works with the architecture, not against it. A bespoke vanity scribed into an alcove, with a tall storage tower built in over the WC, lifts the room out of catalogue.

If you are renovating a Victorian home in Birmingham or the West Midlands and a bespoke kitchen, bedroom, or storage piece is part of the plan, book a design visit. The first visit is to the house, not the showroom.