Most Fitzrovia bathrooms have a problem the brochure never mentions: they are nowhere near a drain. The flats here are largely carved out of buildings that were built for other purposes — showrooms, workshops, offices, retail with storage above — and commercial floorplates are deep. When those floors became apartments, the bathrooms landed where the plan allowed, which is usually the middle of the flat, a long way from the stack, with no external wall.
Everything difficult about refurbishing a bathroom in W1 follows from that, plus one more thing: there is often a business trading directly beneath your floor. Get either wrong and the consequences are not cosmetic.
Waste: the constraint that decides your layout
Water arrives easily. Waste leaves reluctantly. In a deep-plan conversion, waste from your bath, basin and WC has to travel to a stack that may be at the perimeter of the building, and it has to fall the whole way. The available depth to achieve that fall is whatever sits between your finished floor and the structure below — which in these buildings is frequently a raised floor left from the commercial fit-out, or a screed with an acoustic layer added at conversion, or a concrete slab with no give in it at all.
So the first question about any Fitzrovia bathroom is not which tiles. It is: can the waste get there? Sometimes the answer is a gravity run, if you accept the layout the fall dictates. Sometimes it is a pumped system or a macerator, which works when correctly specified and maintained and is unforgiving when treated as invisible. Sometimes the honest answer is that the WC cannot move to where you want it without a compromise you would not accept if it were explained. It should be explained — before you pay for a design.
The reason this is not negotiable is the slab. In a concrete-framed conversion you cannot simply cut a new penetration for a soil pipe because it suits the plan. Coring through a structural slab is a structural matter, it usually requires the freeholder's consent, and it may not be permitted at all. If someone tells you on a first visit that moving the bathroom is straightforward, without knowing what the floor is made of, they do not yet know.
Ventilation with no external wall
An internal bathroom needs mechanical extract, and Part F applies. In a conversion, that means a duct, and the duct has to get from the middle of the floorplate to somewhere it can discharge. That route competes for the same ceiling void as the waste pipework, the ventilation that already exists and, in some buildings, sprinkler pipework serving the floor. Where the building has a communal ventilation system, your bathroom may connect to it rather than to a fan of its own, and altering that connection is not a private decision — it affects the balance of a system serving other people. Confirm with the managing agent what you are connecting to before you specify anything.
Where the discharge has to appear on an elevation, and the building is listed or in a conservation area — which applies to parts of Fitzrovia's period stock — that becomes a question for the local authority. Listed building consent is required for works affecting a listed building's special character. It is not a formality to be assumed away.
The business underneath you
This is the part that makes Fitzrovia bathrooms genuinely different from bathrooms anywhere else we work. Your bathroom floor may be the ceiling of a restaurant, a shop or an office. An escape of water there does not produce a stain and an awkward conversation. It produces a closed business, ruined stock and a claim far larger than the room that caused it.
That reframes the whole job around waterproofing and testing. Tanking is a system, not a coat of paint — the membrane, the tapes at every junction, the collars at every pipe penetration, the floor-to-wall corner, the threshold. Any one of those done casually and the rest is decoration. It is also the part that disappears the moment tiling starts, which is precisely why it is where corners get cut. Ask whoever quotes you what they are tanking, to what height, and where it stops. Ask when the pipework is pressure-tested and whether that happens before anything is closed up. Vague answers are informative.
It also reframes access. If something does go wrong, you may need to get into commercial premises to see it, during their trading hours, with their insurer involved. Knowing who manages the building and who holds keys is worth establishing at the start of a project rather than in the middle of an incident.
Sound, and why your neighbours notice a bathroom
Bathrooms are noisy rooms, and conversions are acoustically compromised in ways purpose-built flats are not. Where a commercial floor became flats, separating floors had to be upgraded to meet residential requirements, usually with an acoustic layer built into the floor construction. That layer is doing a job. It is not spare depth to be sacrificed so that underfloor heating will fit, however tempting it looks when the levels are tight. If the depth is not there, the correct answer is to change the specification, not to compromise the floor and hand your downstairs neighbour a problem they will rightly complain about.
The other acoustic issue in these conversions is the pipework itself. Long waste runs across a floorplate, and pumped systems in particular, are audible if they are clipped hard to structure and left to transmit. A soil pipe passing through a bedroom ceiling void — normal in a deep-plan flat — will be noticed every night unless it is lagged and isolated properly. It costs little at first fix and cannot be fixed afterwards without opening the ceiling again. This is the sort of detail that separates a bathroom that is finished from a bathroom that is done.
Getting materials in and rubble out
Fitzrovia's streets are narrow, heavily restricted, and already saturated with deliveries to the businesses on them. There is frequently nowhere legal to stop, and a skip is often not an option without a permit and a space that does not exist. A bathroom strip-out produces a surprising volume of rubble, and in this stock it usually leaves in bags, carried, on a timetable.
Working hours compound it. In a mixed-use building the permitted window for noisy work is set by the lease and the managing agent, and with commercial tenants below it can be narrow and counter-intuitive — sometimes the morning before a restaurant opens, sometimes specifically not during office hours. Breaking out a floor is noisy. A day that can only run four hours is not a day, and that has to be in the programme and the price honestly rather than discovered on site.
The answer is sequencing: materials arriving when they are needed rather than when they are ordered, waste leaving as it is generated rather than accumulating in a common hallway where a fire officer would rightly object, and protection of the route in — the stairs, the lift if there is one, the common parts — because damage there reaches you through your managing agent regardless of who caused it.
Consent
Most flats here are leasehold, and most leases require freeholder or managing-agent consent — typically a licence to alter — before you alter the property, and a bathroom touches almost every trigger: moving soil and waste, penetrating structure, changing floor build-ups, altering ventilation. In a mixed-use building the lease may add conditions reflecting the commercial tenants: hours, access, insurance, protection. Requirements vary considerably between buildings. Read your lease, ask early, and treat consent as the long lead item, because everything else waits behind it.
The regulations apply regardless: Part F for ventilation, Part G for sanitation and hot water, Part P for the electrical work — the fan, the isolator, lighting to the correct zones, the towel rail, the pump if there is one. Those are part of the job, which is why our Fitzrovia electrical work and plumbing run inside the same project under one point of contact rather than as separate firms with separate excuses.
How it runs, and what it costs
Consent first if the lease requires it. Then survey — including establishing what the floor actually is, where the stack is, and what the ventilation connects to. Then an itemised fixed scope with the specification named. Then hours, access and protection agreed with the building. Then strip-out with waste removed as it goes, first fix, floor preparation, tanking, screed, tiling, second fix, commissioning, and a full test with the room running. Snagging is a stage with a date on it.
Bathroom refurbishment starts from £2,800. What moves a project above that is scope and building: the size of the room, whether the waste has to move and whether the structure allows it, how ventilation is solved, the specification you choose — which is the largest variable and entirely within your control — what is found once the floor is opened, and what the building imposes in hours, access and protection. We will not print a range and call it a quote. You get an itemised fixed price after a survey and it holds unless you change the scope.
More on the local stock is on our Fitzrovia page, more on the trade on our bathroom refurbishment page, and if the bathroom is one part of a bigger plan, see refurbishment in Fitzrovia. Send photographs of the room through the quote form and tell us what is below you — that one detail changes more than anything else you could tell us.