A bathroom in a Hyde Park Estate stucco terrace and a bathroom in a Paddington Basin apartment can look identical when they are finished and share almost nothing in how they are built. One is an exercise in working with a building that predates indoor plumbing. The other is an exercise in working within a system that was fully designed and is now sealed shut. Same postcode, same brief, two different projects — and the reason a quote that ignores which one you have is worthless.
This page sets out what each actually involves, so you can judge whether the person quoting you has understood your building.
Bathrooms in the period terraces
In the stucco stock, bathrooms sit where a bathroom was inserted, not where one was planned. That single fact drives most of the work. The waste has to reach a stack that is usually at the rear of the building, and the route it takes was often improvised. Where the fall is marginal, the shower drains slowly and the trap gurgles, and no fitting you buy will fix it. Where we can improve the fall, we do; where the structure will not allow it, we say so before you commit, because a beautifully tiled room that drains badly is a failure regardless of the tiles.
Floors are the second constraint. Timber joists move. Tile and stone do not. Between them sits the decision that determines whether your grout cracks in year two: how much the floor is stiffened and decoupled before anything is laid. In a converted flat, the floor you are strengthening is also somebody's ceiling, and if that ceiling is original lath and plaster with cornice, the cost of getting it wrong is not the tiles. It is their ceiling. This is why we survey the floor before pricing rather than after.
Ventilation is genuinely awkward in these houses. Bathrooms carved out of internal rooms have no external wall, so extract has to be ducted — often a long run to a discharge point that has to satisfy both Part F and, where the building is listed or in a conservation area, the question of what may appear on an elevation. That is a conversation with the local authority and, for a listed building, a matter of listed building consent for works affecting its special character. Do not let anyone tell you it is fine because they have done one nearby.
Then there is the pipework. Many of these houses are still tank-fed by gravity. If you specify a shower valve intended for a pressurised system, you will be disappointed every morning of your ownership. Changing the water system is a legitimate option and a legitimate cost — it just has to be decided at design stage, which is exactly the sort of thing our Paddington plumbing survey exists to establish before a price is fixed.
Bathrooms in the Basin blocks
New-build apartments hide their bathroom. Supply runs from a manifold in continuous plastic pipe, so there are no hidden joints — but there are pipes in places you would not expect and there is no fault-finding by intuition. Waste falls to a stack in a service duct that is usually shared and is often not yours to alter. Extract is frequently not a fan in the wall at all but a branch off a mechanical ventilation unit serving the whole flat, ducted through a ceiling void that is shallower and busier than it looks. Change any one of those without understanding the system and you unbalance the rest of the apartment.
The floor build-up in these blocks is engineered. There is usually an acoustic layer under the screed, and it is there to satisfy the separating-floor performance the building was designed and tested to achieve. It is not spare depth for your underfloor heating. Cutting into it to gain a few millimetres is a decision with consequences for your neighbours and, potentially, for your lease. If the depth is not there, the honest answer is to change the specification, not the structure.
The building itself is the other half of the job. Many of these blocks are recent enough to still be inside a warranty period, and leases and handover packs may place conditions on altering services. Requirements vary from building to building — check yours with the managing agent before you commit to a design. Practically, expect contractor insurance lodged in advance, an induction, a concierge sign-in, a lift booked and protected, deliveries through a nominated entrance in a nominated window, restricted working hours for noisy trades, and a waste route that is not simply "the bins". A bathroom strip-out generates a lot of rubble and it has to leave a tower by lift, in bags, on the building's terms.
The question people forget to ask: where does the water go if it escapes?
Both stocks in Paddington are stacked. Someone lives beneath your bathroom floor. That makes waterproofing the part of the job worth being fussy about, and it is the part that is invisible the moment tiling starts — which is precisely why it is where corners get cut. A tanking system is a system: the membrane, the tapes at the junctions, the collars at the pipe penetrations, the treatment of the floor-to-wall corner and the threshold. Any one of those done casually and the rest is decoration. In a period conversion, the failure shows up on a neighbour's cornice. In a Basin block, it tracks through a floor build-up and appears somewhere you would never have guessed, often weeks later.
Ask whoever is quoting you what they are tanking, to what height, and where it stops. If the answer is vague, that tells you something useful. Ask when the room will be tested, and what "tested" means to them. A pressure test on the pipework before anything is closed up, and a full run with everything working before you are handed the room, are not extras — they are the difference between a bathroom and a future insurance claim.
Consent — for both halves of W2
Most flats here are leasehold, and most leases require freeholder or managing-agent consent, typically a licence to alter, before you make alterations — especially moving soil or waste pipes, touching structure, or changing floor finishes and build-ups. Many freeholds in this part of Paddington sit with large estates and institutional landlords, and their licence-to-alter requirements are not uniform. Some want drawings, a specification and a method statement; some want less. Read your lease and ask early, because consent is the long lead item and everything else waits behind it.
The regulations engage regardless of the stock. A bathroom touches Part F for ventilation, Part G for sanitation and hot water, and Part P for the electrical work — the fan, the isolator, lighting to the correct zones, the towel rail. Those are not optional extras and they are not a separate trade's problem, which is why our Paddington electrical work runs inside the same job rather than alongside it.
How the job runs
Consent first, if the lease requires it. Then survey and a fixed, itemised scope with the specification named — not "shower", but which shower. Then the building arrangements: insurance lodged, induction done, lift booked, hours confirmed. Then protection of the route in, the lift, the common parts and the floors, because damage to a communal corridor is your problem via your managing agent even though it happened to a contractor.
Then the work: strip-out with waste removed as it is generated; first fix plumbing and electrics; floor preparation; tanking, properly, to the areas that need it rather than a token coat behind the shower; screed and any heating; tiling; second fix; commissioning; and testing everything under pressure with the room running. Snagging is a stage with a date, not an argument at the end.
The order does not change much between the two stocks. What changes is where the risk sits. In a terrace, it sits in the structure and the ceiling below. In a Basin flat, it sits in the systems and the building's rules. Both are manageable when they are identified at the start, and both are expensive when they are discovered in week three.
What drives your price
Bathroom refurbishment starts from £2,800. What moves a project above that starting point is scope and building, in roughly that order: the size of the room; whether the layout stays or the waste has to move; the specification you choose, which is the largest single variable and entirely yours to control; the state of what is behind the tiles once it is opened up; whether the floor needs structural work; how ventilation has to be solved; and what the building imposes in access, hours and protection.
What we will not do is give you a range on a page and call it a quote. You get an itemised fixed price after a survey, before anyone starts, and it holds unless you change the scope. If you want to know how the same decisions play out on a bigger canvas, our Paddington refurbishment page covers whole-flat projects, and the bathroom refurbishment service page covers the trade in detail.
Working with us
One point of contact from survey to snagging. One team, so the tiler is not waiting on a plumber from another firm. The set price is published, the fixed quote comes before work begins, and the building's paperwork is our job rather than yours. There is more about the area and the buildings we work in on our Paddington page, and the quote form takes photographs — send us the room and we will tell you what we can see.