New Build Architect in Wandsworth

A new build architect designs a home from nothing. There is no existing structure to convert or extend, so the whole thing has to be invented and resolved: the way the house sits on its plot, its footprint and height, its internal layout, its structure and foundations, its windows and daylight, its heating, hot water, ventilation, drainage and electrics, and its energy performance — all designed together and drawn to a standard a contractor can price and build. It is the most complete form of architectural work there is, and on a constrained London plot it is also one of the most demanding.

This page is for anyone contemplating a genuinely new home in Wandsworth. That includes people building a single house on a plot — an infill gap between existing houses, a large side or back garden, a backland site reached down a drive, or a redundant piece of land — and people who own an existing house and want to demolish it and build a better one in its place, which planners call a replacement dwelling. It also covers small new-build schemes of a handful of homes, the kind that fall onto Wandsworth's 'small sites' agenda, and self-builders who want a design-and-engineering team to take a plot from an idea to a consented, buildable scheme.

What unites all of these is that they create new residential floorspace, and in planning terms that is a significant step. A new dwelling is a new planning unit with its own front door, its own amenity space, its own parking and refuse arrangements and its own impact on the street and its neighbours. Wandsworth assesses all of that in the round, which is why the design has to be right before the application is made — not adjusted afterwards in response to objections.

Crown works on new homes across Wandsworth and the neighbouring south-west London boroughs as a single, coordinated service. We do the architecture — the design and the planning application — and we do the structural engineering and the building services in-house alongside it. On a new build that integration is not a nicety; it is the difference between a scheme that looks good on a planning drawing and one that is genuinely buildable, because on a new house the architecture, the structure and the services are completely intertwined from the very first sketch.

Almost always, yes — and it will be a full planning application. This is the single most important point on the whole page, because people sometimes assume the generous permitted development rights that exist for extensions and some change-of-use conversions might extend to new homes. They do not. You cannot build a new, separate dwelling under permitted development. The rights that allow larger rear extensions, loft conversions or outbuildings are about altering or serving an existing house; they never create a new one.

A knock-down-and-rebuild is the same. Demolishing an existing house and building a new one in its place is not permitted development — the new house is a new building and needs full planning permission in its own right, judged as a new dwelling. (The demolition itself can sometimes proceed under a separate prior-approval procedure, but the replacement house always needs full permission.) So whether you are building on a bare plot or replacing an existing home, plan for a full application from the outset.

A full planning application means the whole scheme is assessed against Wandsworth's Local Plan and the London Plan, and can be refused for a wide range of reasons: the principle of a new dwelling on the site, its design and appearance, its scale and density, its impact on neighbours' daylight, sunlight, privacy and outlook, the quality of the homes it creates, its amenity space, its parking and refuse, its trees and biodiversity, its drainage and its energy performance. Nothing is off the table. That breadth is exactly why the design work matters: every one of those tests has to be answered in the application itself.

There are a few narrow situations where a smaller consent or none is involved — for example, minor works to an existing curtilage — but building a new home is never one of them. On any new-build instruction we confirm the planning history of the site, whether it sits in a conservation area or affects a listed building, whether any trees are protected, and whether the plot has any relevant designations, and we build the full application around those facts. The honest starting position is: a new dwelling in Wandsworth needs full planning permission, and the job is to design one that deserves it.

Wandsworth is a large south-west London borough that runs along the south bank of the Thames, taking in Battersea, Balham, Putney, Tooting, Wandsworth Town and Nine Elms. It takes its name from the River Wandle, which flows through the borough to meet the Thames at Wandsworth. Historically the area was part of Surrey, and the old Wandsworth district was made up of the parishes of Battersea, Clapham, Putney, Streatham, Tooting Graveney and Wandsworth. The modern London Borough of Wandsworth was created in 1965 by merging the former metropolitan borough of Battersea with about two-thirds of the old borough of Wandsworth, which is why the borough's identity is really a coalition of distinct riverside and high-street towns rather than a single centre.

The borough's defining piece of infrastructure is Clapham Junction, which — despite its name — sits in Battersea, not Clapham. As the railway companies laid their network through the 1840s, 50s and 60s, Clapham Junction became, and remains, the busiest railway interchange in the country. That connectivity shaped the whole borough: it drove the Victorian and Edwardian expansion of Battersea, Balham and Tooting, filling street after street with terraced housing that is now the borough's dominant housing stock — and, crucially for a new build architect, the tightly grained context into which any new home has to fit.

Wandsworth's landmarks tell the story of that growth and its reinvention. Battersea Power Station, the vast brick temple designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott and opened in 1933, dominates the riverside and has been reborn as a huge mixed-use quarter at the heart of the Nine Elms regeneration — one of the largest new-build districts in Europe. Battersea Park, with its Peace Pagoda beside the Thames, is one of London's great Victorian parks. The former Battersea Town Hall of 1892, now the grade II* listed Battersea Arts Centre, and the former Granada Cinema of 1937 in Tooting are among the borough's finest interiors. In Wandsworth Town, the Ram Quarter has transformed the former Young's brewery site; the Ram Brewery is often cited as the oldest continuous site of brewing in Britain. Putney, at the western end, grew as a Thames crossing point, is famous as the start of the University Boat Race, and hosted the 1647 Putney Debates at St Mary's Church — a landmark moment in English democracy. In 2025 the whole borough held the title of London Borough of Culture.

For a new-build project this context is not just colour; it is planning-relevant in the most direct way. Wandsworth is overwhelmingly built out, so almost every new home sits in an established, characterful street or behind existing houses, and the design has to respond to that grain — the prevailing scale, roofline, materials, building line and rhythm of the surroundings. Large parts of the borough are conservation areas; many streets are lined with trees; the Thames and the Wandle bring flood risk to the riverside and valley; and the borough's own housing ambitions concentrate the biggest new-build numbers in the opportunity areas rather than the residential streets. Knowing exactly where your plot sits on that map — its character, its constraints and its policy context — is the starting point for a credible new home.

New-build housing in Wandsworth has always come in two very different forms, and understanding the split explains where the opportunities for a one-off new home actually are. On one hand there is the borough's Victorian and Edwardian expansion — the great wave of speculative terraced house-building that followed the railways in the second half of the nineteenth century, which laid down the street pattern and the housing stock that define most of the borough today. On the other hand there is the modern era of large-scale regeneration, concentrated in a handful of opportunity areas, which is where the borough now expects the bulk of its new homes to come from.

The single biggest new-build story of the last two decades is Nine Elms and Battersea. The stretch of former industrial and utility land along the south bank of the Thames — including the derelict Battersea Power Station and the old New Covent Garden and Nine Elms sites — has been transformed into one of the largest regeneration zones in Europe, with tens of thousands of new homes, a new Northern line extension, the redeveloped power station and the relocated US Embassy. This is where high-rise, high-density new-build development belongs in Wandsworth, and it operates on a completely different scale and set of tests from a single house on a suburban plot.

The borough's Local Plan continues that pattern. It concentrates its largest housing capacities in the opportunity and intensification areas — with major numbers directed to Nine Elms, and further significant capacity around Clapham Junction and Wandsworth Town — and it looks to the town centres for further growth. Roehampton and the Alton Estate are the focus of a separate regeneration programme, including exemplar low-energy homes. Alongside all of this the plan increasingly relies on 'small sites': the infill plots, backland sites, garden land and replacement dwellings scattered across the borough's residential fabric, which together are expected to make a real contribution to housing delivery.

It is that small-sites world where most one-off new homes live. A single new house on a garden or infill plot, or a better home replacing a tired one, is precisely the kind of scheme the small-sites agenda anticipates — but it also sits within a borough that fiercely protects its existing family housing, its residential character and its amenity. The history, in short, is a borough that delivers its big numbers in a few big places and asks its residential streets to absorb carefully designed, well-mannered new homes one plot at a time. Getting a new home onto one of those plots is a matter of designing to that expectation exactly.

A new home in Wandsworth is judged against the borough's Local Plan, which was adopted on 19 July 2023 and covers the period 2023 to 2038. The plan sets an ambitious housing target — planning for a minimum in the order of 20,000 new homes over the plan period — and it is built around area strategies for the borough's five town centres: Wandsworth, Clapham Junction, Putney, Tooting and Balham. Knowing which policies apply to your plot lets us build the application to satisfy them rather than hoping to by accident.

The most directly relevant policy for a one-off new home is the plan's housing quality standard (Policy LP27), which requires all new residential development to meet defined standards for internal space, daylight, sunlight, layout, storage and amenity. It works alongside the plan's housing-mix policy (LP24), which seeks an appropriate mix of dwelling sizes with an emphasis on family-sized homes, and its policy protecting the existing housing stock (LP25), which — importantly for replacement and conversion schemes — resists the loss of family housing and applies a floorspace threshold (a 130 square metre figure features in the borough's approach) above which larger homes are expected to deliver a genuine uplift in family accommodation rather than simply more, smaller units.

Amenity space is a genuinely distinctive Wandsworth requirement, and it is set higher here than the London-wide minimum. The borough generally looks for around 30 square metres of private amenity space for a new house, and for flatted schemes around 10 square metres per flat as a balcony, terrace or private garden (with additional communal amenity space required on larger schemes of ten or more units). For a new house on a tight plot, finding genuine, usable private garden space of that order — while still meeting daylight, privacy and character requirements — is one of the real design disciplines, and it often governs how big the house can honestly be.

Beyond these, a new-build application engages the plan's design policies (respecting local character, scale, materials and the street scene), its trees and biodiversity policies (protecting existing trees and delivering biodiversity net gain), its flood-risk and drainage policies, its parking and sustainable-transport policies, and its energy and sustainability policies, which push new homes towards low-carbon design ahead of the national standards. Our approach is to read the plot against every one of these before we design, so the scheme is shaped by the policy framework from the first sketch rather than colliding with it at the application stage.

Sitting above the Local Plan is the London Plan (2021), the Mayor's spatial development strategy, which every new home in Wandsworth must also comply with. Two of its ideas dominate new-build design. The first is the 'design-led approach' to density in Policy D3, which replaced the old numerical density matrix. Instead of a fixed dwellings-per-hectare figure, the plan asks that each site be developed to the most appropriate form and capacity for its context, supporting infrastructure and character — established through testing design options. For a one-off house this means the right answer is the well-designed house the plot can genuinely accommodate, not the maximum that could be crammed onto it.

The second is the London Plan's housing quality and standards policy (Policy D6), which incorporates and reinforces the nationally described space standard and adds London-specific requirements. The most tangible of these is floor-to-ceiling height: for new housing, London requires a minimum clear ceiling height of 2.5 metres over at least 75 per cent of the gross internal area of each home — higher than the national 2.3 metre baseline — which directly affects storey heights and therefore the overall height of a new house. It also sets expectations on dual aspect, daylight and sunlight, private and communal amenity space, and the quality of internal layouts.

The nationally described space standard itself is the floor for internal sizes. It sets minimum gross internal floor areas by number of bedrooms, bedspaces and storeys — for example a one-bedroom, two-person single-storey home has a minimum of 39 square metres (37 where a shower room replaces a bathroom), rising through the two-, three- and four-bedroom sizes — together with minimum bedroom sizes (a single bedroom at least 7.5 square metres, a double at least 11.5), minimum built-in storage, and the minimum ceiling height. These are not aspirations; on a London new build they are effectively mandatory, and every room and every home has to be checked against them.

Taken together, the London Plan and the national space standard mean a new Wandsworth home cannot be designed by floor area alone. It has to hit the minimum GIA for its size, give every bedroom its minimum area, provide the storage, reach the 2.5 metre ceiling over most of its area, and deliver good daylight, sunlight and — wherever the plot allows — dual aspect. We design to all of these from the outset, because a scheme that quietly misses one of them is a scheme that will need to be reworked, or refused.

A large share of new-build work in a built-out borough like Wandsworth is not on empty plots but on ones that already have a house — a tired, poorly built or unsympathetic dwelling that the owner wants to demolish and replace with something better. In planning terms this is a replacement dwelling, and it is a full planning application for a new house, assessed as new development. The existing house does not give you an automatic right to whatever you like in its place; it gives you a starting point that the new design has to justify.

The tests are the ones that apply to any new home, sharpened by the comparison with what is there now. Wandsworth will look hard at scale and bulk: a replacement that is dramatically larger, taller or deeper than the original — and than its neighbours — will struggle, because it can harm the character of the street and the amenity of adjoining houses through loss of daylight, sunlight, privacy or outlook. A replacement dwelling that respects the prevailing scale and building line, is well designed, and demonstrably improves on the original in quality and energy performance is a far stronger proposition than one that simply maximises volume.

The plan's protection of family housing is relevant here too. Under the borough's approach to protecting the existing stock, a substantially larger replacement (above the floorspace threshold that features in that policy) is expected to genuinely enhance family accommodation rather than be sub-divided into smaller units, and the loss of a family-sized home is resisted. So the housing outcome — what kind of home the replacement actually provides — is part of the assessment, not just its architecture.

We approach replacement dwellings by testing early what the plot can properly support: the footprint, height and massing that sit comfortably in the street and respect the neighbours, the amenity space the borough expects, and the daylight and privacy relationships with adjoining houses (which we can model). We then design a home that is demonstrably better than what it replaces — better planned, better built, and far more energy-efficient — and we make that case explicitly in the planning application. That is how a knock-down-and-rebuild wins consent rather than a refusal for overdevelopment.

The most common way a new home appears in Wandsworth's residential streets is on a difficult plot: an infill gap in a terrace, a large back garden, a backland site behind existing houses reached by a drive or a former garage court. These 'small sites' are exactly what the borough's housing strategy increasingly relies on — but they are also the most heavily scrutinised, because building on garden and backland land touches directly on the character and amenity that make Wandsworth's streets what they are.

'Garden-grabbing' — the sub-division of large gardens to build additional houses — has long been contentious, and while gardens are not automatically off-limits, a garden-plot scheme has to overcome real concerns: the loss of garden land and greenery, the impact on the spacious, green character of a street or backland, overlooking and loss of privacy for the surrounding houses, and the awkwardness of access, parking and refuse to a plot buried behind a frontage. Backland development in particular has to solve the access problem convincingly, because a home that can only be reached by a cramped, overlooked drive rarely sits comfortably behind other people's houses.

Infill plots — genuine gaps in an otherwise continuous frontage — are often the most straightforward, because a well-designed house that completes the street can enhance rather than harm it. But the design has to be right: the new house has to respect the building line, the scale, the roofline and the materials of its neighbours, and it has to work at the awkward widths and depths that infill gaps usually present, while still delivering a home that meets the space and amenity standards. A too-narrow or too-deep house that fails on daylight or garden space is the classic infill trap.

Our method on any backland, garden or infill plot is to interrogate the constraints before we commit to a design. Where is the daylight and sunlight, and can we protect the neighbours' as well as provide the new home's? How is the plot accessed, and can refuse and (where needed) parking be arranged without harming the street? What garden space can the new home genuinely have? How do we avoid overlooking in every direction? A scheme that answers those questions in its design — and shows Wandsworth that it has — is one that can turn a difficult plot into a consented new home. One that ignores them is a refusal for overdevelopment or loss of amenity waiting to happen.

The heart of new-build design is arranging a home that is genuinely good to live in within the constraints of the plot and the standards. On a Wandsworth new build that means simultaneously hitting the nationally described space standard for each home's overall size, giving every bedroom its minimum area, providing the required storage, reaching the 2.5 metre London ceiling height over most of the floor area, delivering good daylight and sunlight to the main rooms, achieving dual aspect wherever the plot allows, and finding the borough's expected private amenity space — all while respecting the character and scale of the surroundings and protecting the neighbours.

Those requirements pull against each other, and resolving them is the design skill. Push the house bigger to gain internal space and you eat into the garden the borough wants, or overshadow a neighbour; pull it back to protect amenity and you may lose the room sizes. The height needed for 2.5 metre ceilings across two or three storeys has to be reconciled with a roofline that fits the street. Windows placed for daylight and dual aspect have to be positioned so they do not overlook adjoining houses. The good scheme is the one where these tensions are resolved into a coherent, well-proportioned home rather than fought to a compromise that satisfies none of them.

Layout is where a new home earns its quality. Because we are designing from scratch, we can plan the house properly: living space oriented to the sun and the garden, bedrooms placed for quiet and privacy, storage designed in rather than tacked on, circulation kept efficient, and the whole thing arranged so that it will feel generous even where the plot is tight. A new build is the one project where nothing is inherited, so nothing has to be compromised by an existing structure — provided the design does the work.

We test every scheme against the standards as we design, so the room sizes, storage, ceiling heights and amenity space are demonstrably met and annotated on the drawings for the case officer to check. And we design the home as an object in its street — its massing, materials, fenestration and roofline responding to the local character — because in Wandsworth a new house that reads as a considered addition to its context is far more likely to be consented than one that ignores it.

A new house has to stand up entirely on its own, so unlike an extension it needs a complete structural design from the ground up — and Crown does that structural engineering in-house, coordinated with the architecture from the first sketch. The foundations, the superstructure, the floors and the roof all have to be designed, calculated and detailed to the Building Regulations, and on a constrained London plot the ground and the neighbours make that far from routine.

Foundations are the first and most site-specific decision, and they turn on the ground conditions. Much of Wandsworth sits on London Clay, a shrinkable, cohesive soil that moves with moisture and is highly sensitive to trees — and the borough's streets are full of mature trees. Where trees are present (or recently removed), foundations often need to be deeper, or piled, to reach below the zone of seasonal moisture movement and to avoid heave and subsidence; the National House Building Council guidance on building near trees drives much of this. Ground investigation — trial pits or boreholes — is frequently needed to establish the soil, the water table and any made ground or contamination, and the foundation design follows from what it finds. Near the Thames and the Wandle, higher water tables and softer ground can push the design towards piles and specialist waterproofing.

Above ground, the superstructure has to be chosen and designed as a whole: traditional masonry cavity walls, a timber frame, structural insulated panels, or a steel or concrete frame where spans and openings demand it. Modern homes want large glazed openings, open-plan living and generous spans, all of which need properly engineered beams, lintels and load paths, and a full new house means designing the roof, the intermediate floors, the lateral stability and the connections, not just a few beams. Where the new home adjoins or is close to existing houses — infill and backland plots especially — the structure also has to be built without undermining the neighbours, which brings in temporary works and the Party Wall arrangements discussed below.

Because we hold the architecture and the engineering together, the structure is designed into the home rather than bolted on afterwards. The foundation strategy suits the ground and the trees, the frame suits the spans and the openings the design wants, and the whole load path is resolved before the drawings are issued — so the house that gets planning permission is the same house that can actually be built, without the value-engineering surprises that appear when structure is left as an afterthought.

A new home needs a complete set of building services — heating, hot water, ventilation, electrics, water supply and drainage — designed as an integrated system, and again we do this engineering in-house alongside the architecture and structure. Because everything is new, the services can be designed properly for the way the house will actually work, and they can be planned around the energy strategy from the start rather than squeezed in at the end.

Heating and hot water are now the central decision, because the energy standards are steering new homes decisively away from gas. Under the direction of travel set by Part L and the coming Future Homes Standard, a new dwelling is expected to use low-carbon heating — in practice an air-source heat pump for most houses — rather than a gas boiler. That changes the whole services design: heat pumps run at lower flow temperatures and work best with a well-insulated, airtight fabric and larger emitters or underfloor heating, so the heating system, the fabric and the layout all have to be designed together. Getting this right early is what makes a low-carbon home comfortable and efficient rather than a compromise.

Ventilation is the other big move in a modern new home. A highly insulated, airtight house needs deliberate, controlled ventilation to stay healthy and free of condensation and mould — commonly mechanical ventilation with heat recovery (MVHR), which supplies fresh air and recovers warmth from the air it extracts. MVHR has to be designed into the house from the outset: ductwork routes, plant space and ceiling voids all have to be planned, which is difficult to retrofit into a design that ignored it. Alongside this the home needs a full electrical design (increasingly including provision for an electric-vehicle charge point and solar PV), a domestic hot-water strategy, and incoming water, gas-where-retained and utility connections.

Drainage ties the services to the site. A new home has to dispose of both foul and surface water, and the two are treated very differently on a modern scheme. Foul drainage connects to the public sewer (subject to the water authority's requirements). Surface water, however, is expected to follow sustainable drainage principles — dealt with on site through soakaways, permeable paving, rainwater harvesting, attenuation or green roofs wherever the ground allows — rather than simply piped to the sewer, which is covered in more detail below. We design all of the services as one coordinated package with the structure and the architecture, so the plant, ducts, pipes and connections all have a designed place in the house before it is built.

Energy is now one of the defining requirements of a new home, and it has to be designed in from the start rather than checked at the end. Every new dwelling in England must comply with Part L of the Building Regulations (conservation of fuel and power), and compliance is demonstrated by an energy calculation — currently the Standard Assessment Procedure (SAP) — carried out by an accredited assessor at design stage and confirmed on completion. The SAP calculation models the home's fabric, heating, hot water, ventilation and any renewables against a target, and a new home cannot be signed off unless it passes.

The current standard is the version of Part L that came into force in June 2022, which was introduced as an interim step towards the Future Homes Standard and requires new homes to produce meaningfully lower carbon emissions than the previous standard (in the order of a 31 per cent reduction), with better-insulated fabric, lower-carbon heating and, in practice, a real push away from gas. Designing to this standard today means a genuinely well-insulated, airtight envelope, efficient (usually low-carbon) heating, good ventilation and often some on-site renewable generation.

The Future Homes Standard is the destination, and it is close. It is designed to make new homes produce around 75 to 80 per cent less carbon than homes built to the older 2013 standard and to be 'zero-carbon ready' — so that as the electricity grid decarbonises, the homes become effectively zero-carbon in use with no further work. In practice it means low-carbon heating (heat pumps rather than fossil-fuel boilers, which will not comply), high-performance fabric, and solar photovoltaic panels on the majority of new homes; the assessment tool itself is moving from SAP to a new Home Energy Model. The regulations bringing it into force have been laid, and the direction is unmistakable even for homes designed and built in the run-up to it.

For anyone building a new home in Wandsworth now, the practical advice is to design to the Future Homes direction of travel from the outset: a fabric-first, well-insulated and airtight envelope, an air-source heat pump, mechanical ventilation with heat recovery, and solar PV where the roof allows — with the electrical and services design ready for EV charging and battery storage. Wandsworth's own Local Plan energy policies already push new homes towards low-carbon and, on larger schemes, net-zero-aligned design ahead of the national minimum, so a home designed to the coming standard is both future-proof and better placed in planning. We set the energy strategy at the very start, because it shapes the fabric, the heating, the ventilation and even the roof, and it is far cheaper and better to design in than to bolt on.

A new home creates new drainage demand, and how it deals with water is a real planning and Building Regulations issue in Wandsworth — a borough with the Thames on its northern edge, the River Wandle running through it, low-lying riverside land, and areas of surface-water flood risk. Both foul drainage (from kitchens and bathrooms) and surface-water drainage (rainwater from roofs and hard surfaces) have to be designed, and they are handled very differently under current policy.

Foul drainage from a new home normally connects to the public sewer, subject to the requirements and consent of the water and sewerage undertaker. Where a straightforward gravity connection is not possible — on some backland and lower-lying plots — the design may need pumped drainage, and the capacity of the existing sewer to take the additional flow sometimes has to be confirmed. This is a solvable but site-specific problem that we identify early.

Surface water is where the modern rules bite. National and London policy expect new development to follow the sustainable drainage (SuDS) hierarchy — managing rainwater at or near the surface, and discharging it, in order of preference, to the ground (via soakaways or infiltration), then to a watercourse, then to a surface-water sewer, and only as a last resort to the combined sewer, and always at a restricted rate that mimics the natural greenfield run-off. On a garden or backland plot this often means the scheme has to demonstrate that it will not increase surface-water run-off, using measures such as permeable paving, soakaways, rainwater harvesting, attenuation tanks or green roofs. Whether soakaways work depends on the ground — London Clay drains poorly — so an infiltration test often informs the strategy.

For a new Wandsworth home this means the drainage strategy has to be part of the design, not an afterthought, and on a plot in or near a flood-risk area a flood risk assessment may be needed too, potentially driving finished floor levels, resilient construction and safe access. We design the foul and surface-water drainage alongside the rest of the scheme, size the SuDS measures for the plot and its ground conditions, and make sure the strategy is credible and consistent across the planning drawings and the Building Regulations package.

Many Wandsworth new builds start with demolition — clearing an existing house on a replacement-dwelling plot, or removing garages, outbuildings or hardstanding on an infill or backland site. Demolition is a controlled activity: for the demolition of a building you generally have to give the council prior notification (a 'prior approval for demolition') so it can set conditions on how the works are carried out and made good, and demolition also has to comply with health-and-safety and waste-management requirements. On a replacement dwelling the demolition is a separate step, but it is the new house that needs full planning permission.

Where a new home sits close to, or shares a boundary with, existing houses — which on Wandsworth's tight plots is the norm — the Party Wall etc. Act 1996 usually comes into play. The Act governs work to shared (party) walls, building on or at the boundary line, and excavation for foundations within three metres (and in some cases six metres) of a neighbouring structure to a depth below its foundations. New foundations near a neighbour, and any work to a boundary wall, typically require notice to be served on the affected neighbours, and if they do not consent, a party wall surveyor (or an agreed surveyor) prepares an award setting out how the work will proceed and protecting both parties. This is a legal process running alongside the planning and Building Regulations work, and it needs to be started in good time.

Building close to neighbours also shapes the design and the construction method, not just the paperwork. Foundations near a boundary may need to be designed to avoid undermining or affecting the adjoining building; the construction sequence has to protect neighbouring structures; and site access, scaffolding, deliveries and noise all have to be manageable on a constrained plot with houses on several sides. We take all of this into account when we design, so the scheme is not only consentable but genuinely buildable on its actual site.

Getting the demolition consent, the party wall process and the neighbour-sensitive construction planning underway early is one of the least glamorous but most important parts of a new-build project. Left too late, any of them can stall a scheme that is otherwise ready to go on site. We flag them at feasibility and manage them as part of the overall programme so they are dealt with in step with the design and the consents rather than as last-minute obstacles.

A new home creates new floorspace, and new floorspace is what the Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL) is charged on. CIL is a charge, calculated per square metre of net additional internal floorspace, that funds the infrastructure needed to support development. In Wandsworth a new dwelling can attract two separate CIL charges: the borough's own Wandsworth CIL and the Mayor of London's CIL (currently MCIL2), which funds strategic transport. Both are charged on the net new floorspace the development creates, so building a new home almost always brings a CIL liability that has to be budgeted for from the start.

The rates vary by location and use. Wandsworth's charging schedule divides the borough into charging areas, with markedly different residential rates — for example, substantial per-square-metre charges in the Nine Elms area (with the highest rates on the prime riverside frontage), and a nil rate in the Roehampton charging area — while the Mayoral CIL applies on top across the borough. Because the rates and the exemptions are technical and location-specific, the CIL position on a particular plot has to be worked out from the current schedules rather than assumed, and it is one of the numbers we establish at feasibility.

There are important reliefs that can reduce or remove CIL. Self-builders who are building their own home to live in can claim self-build exemption, and there are exemptions for residential annexes and extensions and for demolished floorspace that is offset against the new floorspace — but these reliefs are procedurally strict: they must be claimed on the correct forms before development starts, and missing a step can forfeit the relief and even trigger surcharges. On a replacement dwelling in particular, the floorspace of the demolished house can usually be offset against the new house (subject to the rules), which materially affects the net chargeable area. We make sure the CIL forms and any reliefs are handled correctly and on time.

Alongside CIL, larger or particular schemes can attract planning obligations under Section 106 agreements — most commonly affordable-housing contributions. In Wandsworth even small residential schemes are relevant here: developments of between one and nine homes are generally required to make a financial contribution towards affordable housing in the borough, so a single new house can carry an affordable-housing payment as well as CIL. We identify the full financial picture — CIL (borough and Mayoral), any affordable-housing contribution, and the council's application fees — at the outset, so there are no surprises later in the project.

A new home is delivered through a sequence of work stages, and we produce a specific, escalating package of drawings and documents at each one. The industry framework for this is the RIBA Plan of Work, and running a new build through those stages keeps the design, the consents and the construction information in the right order — so nothing is drawn twice and nothing is missed.

The early stages are about establishing what the plot can support and fixing the design. At feasibility and concept (RIBA Stages 1-2) we carry out or commission a measured survey and topographical survey of the plot, check the planning history and constraints, and develop the concept design — the way the house sits on the plot, its footprint, height and massing, and its outline layout — tested against the space, amenity, density and character requirements. This is where we give you an honest view of what the plot will genuinely deliver before you spend money on a full application.

The developed design stage (RIBA Stage 3) produces the planning application. For a new dwelling this is a full application to Wandsworth: existing and proposed site plans, floor plans, elevations and sections, with areas annotated against the space standards; a design and access statement setting out how the scheme responds to the site and the policies; and the supporting reports the site calls for — which for a new build commonly include an arboricultural (tree) report, a flood risk assessment and drainage strategy where relevant, an energy statement, a biodiversity/ecology assessment for net gain, and a transport/parking statement. A coordinated, self-consistent application is materially more likely to be approved and less likely to be bogged down in clarification requests.

The technical stages (RIBA Stages 4 onwards) turn the consented design into a buildable house. This is the Building Regulations and construction package: fully detailed plans, sections and construction details; the structural engineering drawings and calculations for the foundations, frame, floors and roof; the building services and drainage design; the SAP energy calculations; and the specifications a contractor needs to price and build accurately. Because we hold the architecture, structure and services together, this package is coordinated across all three disciplines, so the information the builder receives is consistent — the beams, ducts, drains, insulation and details all agree with one another and with the house that was consented.

The process starts with feasibility. We survey the plot, establish its planning history, constraints and designations (conservation area, listed buildings, protected trees, flood risk), and test what a new home on the site can genuinely support against the borough's design, density, space and amenity standards. Where it is worthwhile — and on a contested plot it usually is — we can use Wandsworth's pre-application advice service to get the council's early view before a full application is committed. This is where you get an honest read on whether, and in what form, the plot works.

We then design the scheme through the concept and developed-design stages and prepare the full planning application, submitting it to Wandsworth through the Planning Portal with the drawings and the supporting reports. A householder-scale application is generally determined against an eight-week statutory period; a larger scheme (typically ten or more dwellings, or larger sites) is a 'major' application with a thirteen-week target and a fuller assessment. During determination the application is publicised, neighbours and consultees are consulted, and the case officer assesses it against the Local Plan and the London Plan. We manage the application actively through that window — responding to the officer, addressing objections, and negotiating amendments where that will secure a consent.

Once planning permission is granted (usually with conditions that have to be discharged before or during construction), we take the scheme into the technical and Building Regulations stage. Building Regulations approval — through a building control body — covers the structural adequacy, fire safety, energy performance, ventilation, drainage, sound insulation and everything else that makes the house safe and compliant, and it applies to the whole new dwelling. In parallel we deal with the demolition consent, the party wall process, the CIL forms and any conditions, so the project moves cleanly from consent towards a start on site.

Because the same team that designed and consented the house prepares the construction information and coordinates the structure and services, the move from planning permission to construction is a continuation of one process rather than a fresh start with new consultants who have to learn the scheme. That continuity is what keeps a new build on programme and on budget, and it means there is a single, accountable point of contact from the first survey to the finished home.

The cost of designing and delivering a new home in Wandsworth depends on the size and complexity of the house, the difficulty of the plot, and how much of the full package you need — from a single well-mannered infill house on a straightforward plot, through a replacement dwelling that has to be argued past overdevelopment concerns, up to a backland scheme needing tree, flood, drainage, ecology and access work. We scope our work to your specific project and give you a clear fee proposal, staged against the RIBA work stages, before design work begins, so you can see exactly what each stage delivers and costs.

Separate from our design and engineering fee, you should budget for several other costs. The council's planning application fee is set nationally and payable to Wandsworth on submission (the fee for a new dwelling is higher than for a householder extension, and higher still for major schemes), with pre-application advice charged separately if you use it. Surveys and specialist reports — measured and topographical survey, arboricultural report, flood risk assessment, ground investigation, ecology, energy assessment — carry their own costs where the site needs them. Then there are the Building Regulations and building-control fees, the SAP assessment, the structural and services design (which we do in-house), the party wall surveyors' fees, and — importantly — the CIL liability (borough and Mayoral) and any affordable-housing contribution. And of course the build cost itself, which for a new home is substantial. We set out this whole picture at the start so there are no surprises.

On timescales, feasibility and concept design typically take a few weeks once we can survey the plot; the developed design and full application then run to a submission, with a new-dwelling application generally determined against an eight-week (or thirteen-week major) period, longer where pre-application advice or negotiation is involved. The technical and Building Regulations package follows the consent, and the build itself is measured in months. A realistic overall programme for a one-off new home in Wandsworth, from first instruction to completion, is best measured in the order of a year to eighteen months or more, and we give you a programme for your specific scheme at the outset.

It is worth remembering where money is actually lost on new-build projects: on refusals that a better-designed scheme would have avoided; on foundations, drainage or party wall problems discovered too late; on schemes that have to be redesigned because the space, amenity or energy standards were not met; and on CIL reliefs forfeited by a missed form. Getting the design, the engineering and the process right first time is by a wide margin the most cost-effective way to build a new home here.

Understanding why new homes get refused is the best way to make sure yours does not, and in a built-out borough like Wandsworth the reasons cluster around a few recurring themes. The most common is overdevelopment: a scheme that is too big, too tall or too dense for its plot and its context — a replacement dwelling that dwarfs its neighbours, or a backland or garden plot squeezed with a house the site cannot comfortably hold. A home that respects the prevailing scale, building line and character of its surroundings avoids this; one that maximises volume invites it.

The next big category is harm to neighbours' amenity: loss of daylight or sunlight, loss of privacy through overlooking, or an overbearing sense of enclosure. On tight plots surrounded by other houses these relationships are decisive, and a scheme that has not tested and protected the neighbours' daylight, sunlight and privacy — something we can model at design stage — is highly vulnerable. Closely related is harm to the character of the area: a design that ignores the scale, roofline, materials or rhythm of its street, or that erodes the green, spacious character of a garden or backland setting.

Housing quality is a third recurring reason. A new home that fails to meet the nationally described space standard or the London ceiling-height requirement, that has poor daylight, single-aspect layouts, inadequate storage, or insufficient private amenity space, will be refused for poor residential quality regardless of how it looks from the street. And in Wandsworth the loss of family housing — for example replacing a family home with smaller units above the borough's protective threshold — is itself a reason for refusal under the policy protecting the existing stock.

The remaining refusals come from the technical and site issues that were not answered: unresolved access, parking or refuse on a backland plot; harm to protected trees or a failure to demonstrate biodiversity net gain; unaddressed flood risk or an inadequate drainage strategy; or an energy strategy that does not meet policy. Every one of these is answerable with the right design and the right evidence up front. Our approach is to anticipate the full list of likely reasons for refusal and to design and evidence the scheme against each one before it is submitted — or, where a plot genuinely cannot support what the client wants, to say so honestly at feasibility rather than submit a scheme designed to fail.

Crown Architecture designs and delivers new homes across Wandsworth and the surrounding south-west London boroughs as a single coordinated service: the architecture, the structural engineering and the building services under one roof. On a new build that integration matters more than on any other kind of project, because a new house has no existing structure to inherit — the design, the foundations, the frame, the services, the energy strategy and the drainage all have to be conceived together, and when they are designed by separate firms they clash. We design them as one, so the home that gets planning permission is the same home that can actually be built.

We know the Wandsworth framework: the borough's Local Plan design, density, mix and housing-quality policies; the higher amenity-space expectations; the protection of family housing and the small-sites agenda that most one-off new homes sit within; the London Plan's design-led density approach and space standards; and the Part L and Future Homes energy requirements every new dwelling must meet. We use that knowledge to give you honest advice at feasibility — including telling you when a plot cannot support what you have in mind — and to design new homes that answer the policies head-on.

Just as importantly, we are straightforward to work with. We test the plot and its constraints at the outset, we quote a clear fee staged against the RIBA work stages, and we prepare a coordinated, self-consistent application — with the tree, flood, drainage, ecology and energy evidence a new build needs — that a case officer can approve without having to fill in the gaps. Then, once consent is granted, we prepare the fully coordinated Building Regulations and construction package that carries the home to site.

And we stay with the project throughout. We manage the application through Wandsworth's determination, respond to the case officer and to neighbours' objections, negotiate amendments where that will secure approval, handle the demolition, party wall and CIL processes, and carry the scheme into construction. The aim is a single, accountable point of contact from the first survey to a finished, buildable, energy-efficient home — not a set of planning drawings handed over and a client left to assemble a construction team that has never seen the scheme.

If you are thinking about building a new home in Wandsworth — a house on an infill, garden or backland plot, a replacement for a tired existing dwelling, or a small new-build scheme — send us the address and what you have in mind, and we will give you an honest view of what the plot will support, what it will take to get there, and a free, no-obligation quote for the work.