Under Construction: Sneak a Peak at One of Our Most Impressive Basements

Work is nearing completion on our renovation and extension project in Fulham, which boasts a full plan basement and one of the largest light wells we’ve ever built. Here’s your final glimpse of the site in action before the clients move in to their dream home.

Pollution and general grime had taken their toll on the original bricks, which stood out alongside the fresh bricks from the newly built section. To make sure the old structure looks just as good as the new, the bricks were acid washed and repointed, giving them clean, sharp edges and restoring their original colour.

Here we’re standing in the garden looking down into the lightwell, which is flanked by floor-to-ceiling glazed sliding doors which mirror each other on the ground and basement floors. The basement enjoys a floor-to-ceiling height of around 2.8 metres, which really shows off the scale of this hugely impressive lightwell.

And now we’re standing on the other side, in the basement. The lightwell is south facing, which floods the space with so much light that you don’t feel like you’re in a basement at all. Though at the moment it feels more like a freezer thanks to the blue protective plastic covering the glass.

Services are still being installed in the basement, so it’s hard to take in the scale of the space, which is better appreciated from the now mostly cleared out ground floor.

Here’s a panorama looking out into the garden from roughly the same spot on the ground floor, with the lightwell on the right. The balustrades and stairs haven’t yet been installed, so we wouldn’t recommend walking through those doors.

Art follows art

As we left, we noticed this local artist painting the street scene, including the side of our project. Unfortunately, we didn’t catch his name, so we missed our chance to have the finished piece hanging in our studio.

If you want to see more of our projects, please click here to view our portfolio, where Harbord Street will be featured on completion this summer.