Builders in Burpham

Burpham appears in the Domesday Book as Borham, so there has been something here a very long time, but what you see today is mostly twentieth century. The village grew around the houses near what is now Sutherland Memorial Park, and that older core still has the distinctive redbrick and tile hung houses the area is known for.

Tile hanging matters practically, not just visually. If we are extending a tile hung house the new elevation has to pick the detail up or the whole thing looks wrong, and that means matching plain clay tiles and getting the coursing right rather than reaching for the nearest modern equivalent.

Around that older centre are the larger planned developments, chiefly Weylea Farm and Weybrook Farm, which went up at broadly the same time as Merrow Park. These are conventional estate houses on regular plots. They are well built and straightforward to work on, but they were designed to a budget, so the kitchens are small, the layouts are compartmented, and the garages are narrow.

That is the pattern of the work here. Older core houses need careful, sympathetic work that respects brick and tile. Estate houses need space and light, which usually means going out at the back or opening up inside.

The estate houses at Weylea Farm and Weybrook Farm were laid out efficiently, which is a polite way of saying the gardens are a sensible size rather than a generous one. So the question we get asked most in Burpham is how to add a kitchen and family room without ending up with a patio and nothing else.

The first answer is usually to look inside before looking outside. A lot of these houses have a separate kitchen, a dining room and a hall taking up the whole ground floor in small pieces. Taking out one internal wall and moving a doorway can produce most of the space people wanted from an extension, at a fraction of the cost and without touching the garden.

Where you do need to build, going out three metres with a proper pitched or lantern roof usually beats going out five with a flat one. You keep more garden, you keep more light, and the finished room feels bigger than the floor plan suggests because the ceiling is higher.

The third option people forget is the garage. On these estates the garages are narrow and most are used for storage rather than cars. Converting one gives you a room without losing a square metre of garden, and it is normally a building regulations job rather than a planning one.