The Art of the Side Return Extension

This classic way of improving a terraced and semi-detached home – usually for a new kitchen – is a recipe for disaster if not designed properly. Charlie Luxton advises.

The side return extension is one of the most common domestic building projects. The millions of terraced houses that define so much of our urban landscape are ripe for this addition, but side return extensions need to be thought through properly. Get it wrong and this ‘improvement’ is not just disappointing, but can damage the light, flow and quality of your existing space rather than improve it.

The terraced and semi-detached home is in many ways a fantastic piece of design that provided good-quality, well-lit living space with sublime efficiency. However, the basic design is over 200 years old and in many ways reflects a bygone social structure with smaller separate rooms and perhaps, most problematically with today’s living habits, separate kitchens usually stuck out in the rear outrigger away from the main living space. The side return extension is the answer — and here’s how to get it right.

Design Style

One of the big questions with a side return extension is whether to complement or contrast with the existing house. Both work well and while there are no hard and fast rules, the best approach is to think about the kind of new space you want from your extension. If you are trying to radically alter your interior space, knocking down walls and making big openings for inside/outside living, then clearly this is very different from the existing space in an old terrace. If you are doing this then I think you should contrast the design, expressing a new stage in the building’s life. If however you are proposing smaller French doors and maintaining (but subtly altering) the existing layout, then a more sympathetic ‘in keeping’ design can work. I just get disappointed when I see massive bi-fold doors rammed into a traditional-looking house — it looks incongruous, unsubtle and usually wrong.

Natural Light

Doing away with the separate kitchen by infilling the narrow strip of the garden adjacent to the house and squaring off the floorplan to create a larger kitchen dining room makes a lot of sense. It is often the only possible way of extending the house, but in doing so you can create new space at the expense of daylight penetrating the middle of the house. A large part of the genius of the terraced house design is that the only area that doesn’t usually get good daylight is the stairs. Putting on a side return extension can plunge one of the main rooms into darkness, making it far less usable — you will need to be creative with rooflights, ceiling levels and artificial light to keep the quality of space. One option is to embrace the dark and create an intimate internal room for the evenings that is the Ying to the bright kitchen diner’s Yang, or an alternative is to move toilets and utilities – rooms that do not need so much natural light – to the centre of the house.

Ceiling Heights

A side return extension nearly always requires walls to be knocked down and there is always a temptation to take the easy route when doing this and simply put a steel beam under the joists of the existing floor above to support the rest of the building. This structure is then boxed in to create what the trade calls a ‘downstand’ — learn the name and learn to avoid it at all costs. This is because even though the wall has gone, the residual downstand has a big impact on creating the feeling of a new large single room. It divides the room, stops space flowing and makes the ceiling feel low and heavy. If you have very high ceilings you can design your way around a downstand. But for nearly all situations, go to the extra expense of pushing the new structure into the depth of the floor above and losing it. If you have to cut back on the cost of the kitchen and fit out, do so, as this can be easily improved at a later date — fiddling with the structure can’t.

To increase the sense of space in your new side return extension, try and create taller and/or vaulted ceiling heights in the new area that contrast with the old. This will draw the eye upwards and make even a small increase in space feel much larger.

Get the Pipes Right

Often the rear courtyard of the terrace has, over the years of retrofit and upgrading, become something of a spaghetti junction of services and plumbing. There are often manholes, waste downpipes, rainwater downpipes, etc. One of the first jobs in designing your scheme is to get a handle on how you are going to adapt the plumbing to allow for your new extension to shine. The alternative is boxed-in downpipes squeezing already narrow spaces, big ugly removable manhole covers smack bang in the middle of a new floor, and ugly waste pipes snaking around the roof of your pride and joy — I have seen it all.

The Right Approach

A well-designed, well-built side return extension can give a home a new lease of life, bringing it perfectly up to date for contemporary living. Like everything in building it needs to be properly thought through — so make sure you get the fundamentals right before you get carried away with the finishing touches.

  • Oxfordshire farmhouse nearing completion - Careful design and attention to detail is breathing new life in to a collection of neglected farmhouse buildings in south Oxfordshire. We are restoring original brick barns and reorienting the main farmhouse to take full advantage of a fabulous view,
  • Black Barn Studios in Passive House + magazine - Our studio, Black Barn Studios is the cover star of the current edition of Passive House magazine. The magazine have written an in-depth article about our approach to creating a highly sustainable, energy efficient design exemplar. That attention to detail were key in
  • Planning permission for ultra sustainable office development - Planning approval has been given to a very exciting project; an ultra sustainable office development for an ethical investment company. The ambition of the client is to combine three main areas.  Working environment, sustainability and community. Taken together, these principles
  • Building Insights Podcast - Building Insights is a podcast which speaks to key people from across the construction industry. Ranging from the worlds of design, construction, development, self-build and social housing management, it provides an range of enlightening and unique viewpoints from a wide
  • Blackwood in competition shortlist - One of our recently completed projects, Blackwood , has been shortlisted for two prizes in this year’s The Daily Telegraph Homebuilding & Renovating Awards. It has been nominated for Best Self Build Home and Best Green Home. There is a People’s
  • Planning permission for home in conservation area - We are delighted to have received planning permission for a replacement dwelling on a tucked away and narrow site in Buckinghamshire. The proposals seek to improve the site with a low-energy and highly insulated dwelling that is sustainable and efficient
  • The design team visit to recently completed project - This week we had a team outing to visit one of our completed projects. It’s especially useful to see a project once the client’s have moved in and chat about how they are experiencing living in their new home. It
  • Planning permission for farmhouse annex - We have recently received planning permission for an annex to a farmhouse in Devon. The annex forms part of a multi-phased project for the farm. The design intends to provide accommodation for ageing members of the family where they can
  • Beanacre in The Modern House - A proud moment for the practice as Beanacre is featured in The Modern House journal this week. Click the link here to watch the full film. The team at TMH have done a wonderful job of bringing out the best in the
  • Summer Party! - Charlie Luxton Design recently turned 18! So to celebrate we held our first summer party at Black Barn Studio’s . We were also celebrating our recent AJ Small Projects Award for Sustainability, along with an exhibition of art from locally based artist Kelly Washbourne .
|