The beauty of interior and exterior design

It’s easy to focus entirely on the inside of an extension, the layout, the light, the finishes, and forget that the outside of the house has to work too. We see this most with rear extensions, where a beautiful open-plan kitchen can end up looking bolted on from the garden if the roofline, materials and window proportions weren’t considered together with the interior.

Matching materials without matching everything

You don’t need to use identical brick to the existing house, and sometimes a contrasting material looks more deliberate than a poor colour match. What matters more is proportion, keeping window and door sizes in a sensible relationship to the rest of the house, and thinking about how the extension reads from next door as well as from your own garden.

Light from more than one direction

Rooflights get a lot of attention, and rightly so, but a room with light from two directions, say a rooflight plus a side window, generally feels better than one large expanse of glass on a single wall. It also helps avoid the space feeling like a glass box in summer.

We think about the outside and inside together from the first sketch, not as two separate stages. If you’re planning an extension in Ilford or East London, get in touch and we can talk through what would actually suit your house.