Refurbishing a property in Paddington means first working out which Paddington you are in. The answer changes the programme, the consents, the access and the risks — not by a little, but fundamentally.
South and west of the station you have the stucco terraces and the Hyde Park Estate: tall period houses, many subdivided into flats, in streets where conservation controls are common and some buildings are listed. North and east, around the water, you have Paddington Basin: purpose-built apartment blocks from the last two decades, with concierges, service ducts, mechanical ventilation, contractor inductions and lift booking sheets. A refurbishment contractor who treats these as the same job will discover otherwise at your expense.
Refurbishing in the period stock
The defining feature of these houses is that they have been altered repeatedly, and the alterations were rarely recorded. Open a floor and you find the previous three projects. Walls that appear to be partitions are sometimes carrying load; walls that appear substantial are sometimes hollow. Levels wander. Services run where somebody once found it convenient. None of this is a disaster — it is normal for the stock — but it does mean a fixed price written without opening anything is a fixed price built on optimism.
We deal with that by surveying properly and by being explicit about what is known and what is assumed. Where something genuinely cannot be established without opening up, we say so and price the investigation rather than burying a guess in a total and reopening the conversation later, when you have no leverage and no alternative.
Consents in this stock are the long pole. Where a building is listed, works affecting its special character require listed building consent, and in a conservation area additional planning controls apply — both are matters to confirm with the local authority, not to infer from what a neighbour got away with. Where you are altering a flat, most leases require freeholder or managing-agent consent, usually a licence to alter, particularly for structural work, moving soil or waste pipes, and changing floor build-ups. Many freeholds around here sit with large estates and institutional landlords whose requirements vary; read your lease and start the conversation early. If your works touch a shared wall with next door, the Party Wall etc. Act 1996 may make them notifiable, which carries its own notice periods and cannot be compressed by wanting it more.
The practical texture of the work is period-specific. Cornice, shutters, panelled doors, staircases and original joinery are why people buy this stock, and protecting them properly during a strip-out is a line item, not a courtesy. Sash windows want repair more often than replacement. Damp in these houses is usually a symptom — of a failed gutter, a bridged threshold, a modern impermeable finish trapping moisture in a wall that was built to breathe — and treating the symptom without finding the cause is money spent to be spent again.
Refurbishing in the Basin blocks
Here the building is intact, coherent and documented, and the constraint moves from the fabric to the rules. You are working inside a system: pressurised water from a manifold, waste to a shared duct, mechanical ventilation with heat recovery serving the whole flat through ceiling ducts, an acoustic layer under the screed that exists to meet the separating-floor performance the block was designed to, and in some buildings heating and hot water arriving from communal plant.
Almost every ambitious apartment plan collides with one of those. Moving a kitchen means a waste run that has to reach the same duct with the same fall. Opening a bedroom wall means establishing whether it is plasterboard, structure, or plasterboard hiding services. Underfloor heating means finding depth that the acoustic build-up is not there to donate. Reconfiguring a bathroom means understanding the ventilation as a system rather than a fan. These are all solvable — they are simply not solvable on site by improvisation.
The block's requirements are the other half. Expect contractor insurances and method statements lodged in advance, an induction before anyone starts, sign-in at the concierge, a lift booked and protected for every delivery and every removal, a nominated entrance, restricted hours for noisy work, and a defined waste route. If the building is recent enough to be inside a warranty period, or the lease and handover pack place conditions on altering services, those need confirming with the managing agent before design is fixed rather than after materials are ordered.
Full or partial — a decision worth making deliberately
Plenty of Paddington projects do not need to be everything. A Basin apartment that is ten years old often needs a kitchen, the bathrooms and decoration, and nothing else — the wiring is sound, the windows are sound, and stripping it back further buys you very little. A converted flat in a terrace is the opposite: the visible tiredness is usually the least of it, and doing the cosmetics while leaving a partial rewire and a bad waste run underneath simply means paying twice, the second time through your own new plaster.
The useful test is whether the things you cannot see are near the end of their life. If they are, do them now while the floors are up and the walls are open, because access is most of the cost of that work and you have already paid for it. If they are not, spend the money where you will see it. That judgement needs someone to look at the property honestly, including when the honest answer reduces the job.
Landlords have a further consideration. If the property is let, the standing obligations continue regardless of works: an annual gas safety check under the Gas Safety (Installation and Use) Regulations 1998, and an electrical inspection at least every five years under the 2020 private rented sector electrical safety regulations. A refurbishment is the natural moment to reset both. And if you are a leaseholder facing works billed by your freeholder rather than works of your own, consultation under Section 20 of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985 applies where the cost exceeds £250 for any one leaseholder — worth knowing which side of that line you are on.
The things that actually delay a Paddington refurbishment
In our experience the programme rarely slips because of the building work. It slips because of the things around it.
- Consent. Licence to alter, listed building consent, party wall notices. Each has its own timetable and none of them care about yours. Start them first.
- Access. A lift you can only book in two-hour slots, a street with no loading, a delivery that cannot be taken because nobody arranged the induction.
- Decisions. The tiles that were not chosen, the stone with a lead time, the change of mind in week five. Client decisions are the most common cause of delay on every project we run, and the cure is a decision schedule with dates, agreed at the start.
- Discovery. Mostly in the period stock, mostly structural or drainage. Reduced by surveying, never eliminated.
Waste and deliveries deserve their own mention because W2 is not generous with either. Around the station and the Basin, the traffic and the restrictions make timed deliveries a planning exercise. In the terraces, there is often nowhere to put a skip without a permit and no room to hold materials inside the property. Both are solved by sequencing — materials arriving when they are needed rather than when they are ordered, and waste leaving as it is generated rather than filling a hall.
How we scope and run it
Refurbishment is priced per quotation, because there is no honest alternative. A whole-flat project in a Basin apartment and a whole-house project in a stucco terrace share a word and nothing else. What you get instead of a made-up range is a process: survey, then a written scope that names the specification room by room, then an itemised fixed quote before any work starts, then a programme with the consents and the decision dates on it.
The sequence then runs in the order the building demands. Consent and access arrangements. Protection — the route in, the lift, the common parts, the joinery you are keeping. Strip-out with waste removed as it goes. Structure, if any. First fix plumbing and electrics. Plaster. Floor preparation. Bathrooms and kitchen. Second fix. Decoration. Commissioning and testing. Snagging as a stage with a date on it, not a negotiation at the end.
One point of contact runs all of it and deals with the concierge, the managing agent and the paperwork. You should not be the person relaying messages between your own trades, and you should not be the person the building calls when a lift blanket goes missing.
What to ask whoever quotes you
Ask what they have assumed, and where. Ask what happens when an assumption proves wrong — how a variation is priced and who signs it. Ask who is applying for consent and who is chasing it. Ask what the building's contractor rules are, and whether they have read them. Ask when the fixed price becomes fixed. If those answers are vague, the price is not a price. It is an opening position.
Our refurbishment service page sets out how we structure projects generally, and the Paddington area page covers the buildings we work in across W2. If you are an owner planning one flat or an agent with a portfolio in the area, the honest first step is the same: send us the property and the plan through the quote form, and we will tell you what we would need to establish before we could give you a number worth relying on.