The renovations that will stand the test of time

When there was little else to distract us for a while, the first year or so of the pandemic saw people experiment with all sorts of home improvements. And if it is your home, rather than an investment acquired purely with the purpose of adding value, then why not?

For some of our clients, designing – or re-designing – their homes is a very personal expression of who they are and how they live. Their architectural and design tastes vary wildly, but they enjoy the opportunity to indulge their design fantasies and build the house of their dreams. And since Covid, there’s a greater emphasis than ever on being sociable again, enjoying a wide range of experiences with friends in the comfort of their own home.

We’ve designed karaoke rooms for parties with friends, and provided a soundproofed music room for one couple’s unabashed playing of their music collection at high volume. We’ve created a cellar and tasting room for a client’s prized wine collection, so he couldn’t just store it, but sample it and talk about it with visitors. We deal with many bespoke wellness rooms, with saunas, massage rooms, hammams and multi-sensory showers that add music, colour-changing lights and everything from mist to monsoons.

Outdoor entertainment areas have become big lately, too, including summer houses for yoga or work/study and garden kitchens shrouded in greenery, a beautiful and practical way to extend the living area from inside to out. Our clients are keen to lavish attention and money on their gardens now, often installing carefully curated plants and artworks and specially-commissioned sculptures to create something one-off and remarkable.

If you’re buying and renovating as an investment, however, you want empirical evidence that spending X on a renovation project will return Y. To some extent, that is possible. Adding to the size of your London property is always a wise investment, and the value of those additional square feet in a property is easily quantifiable.

Extensions on prime London properties – providing they are done to a high quality and flexibly designed – will almost certainly pay back more than they cost.

With basements it’s a different calculation. Subterranean square feet are worth around 50%-60% of above-ground space. But while those underground rooms are rarely as desirable as bedrooms or living areas, they do make fabulous spaces for anything enhanced by a sultry, subterranean feel from cinemas to cocktail bars.

How do you know what home improvements are here to stay, though, and which are simply fads? Assuming none of us is actually psychic, then the best thing to do is look backwards. Troubled by the current vogue for pink and blue bathrooms – and still haunted by memories of the avocado equivalent in the 1970s – one Kensington buying agent suggests holding off and waiting to see if you still like the idea in a year.

It’s hard to see the wellness trend waning, though. Covid has shifted priorities for many of us – and no one is complaining about the work/life balance tipping in favour of more pampering and me-time.

Likewise, a beautifully-landscaped garden will catch everyone’s eye, whether as a dinner party talking point or eventual selling point. And though you might want to hold back on pouring concrete and installing expensive pergolas, if purely adding value is your primary aim (buyers balk at anything that looks too costly to undo), any garden installation that offers flexibility – a well-designed studio, for example, that can serve a variety of purposes, and even generate income – is likely to be money well spent.

Swimming pools are a trickier issue. Agents dealing with the super-prime market detect a mood change away from indoor pools, which can often look more money pit than mesmerising to buyers. And no one likes the smell of chlorine, so that needs to be masked or avoided. We generally advise against having a room entirely dedicated to an indoor pool, as they are rarely used enough to justify the expense. But combined with a wider entertainment area, with a bar and relaxation area alongside, it can be far more conducive to using regularly, especially when you have visitors. 

Outdoor pools are great for kids and parties, but they can be high maintenance for little return, especially if you are heating them all year round. And the current vogue for counter current pools set in smart garden sheds? The view of one high-end agent in St John’s Wood is that they’re no fun for playing in, and serious swimmers won’t use them as they need a long lap pool. They’re quite possibly the swimming equivalent of a treadmill that ends up gathering dust.

But here to stay, quite possibly, is the small but growing trend for outdoor swimming ponds, where you swim in natural, non-chlorinated water alongside wildflowers and who knows what forms of wildlife. They look beautiful, they’re relatively low-cost to maintain (about half the ongoing costs of a conventional pool) and they chime nicely with the eco-minded spirit of the times. They can cost up to £250,000 to build, though, so anyone looking for a return on their money could be waiting a while.

It all comes down to what you want to gain from your home renovations. If it’s for personal enjoyment, then who really cares whether it’s in vogue or not, or whether it will persuade future buyers, years down the line, to bid over the odds in order to have it? Your home is yours to indulge in.

If your focus, however, is on making a profit from your improvements, then look at the more fundamental trends such as the growing need, and desirability to be, energy-efficient, sustainably sourced and built, and designed with longevity in mind. If it appeals to people’s desire for self-improvement – such as fitness or wellness facilities – so much the better. And if it adds space and/or storage, you can rarely go wrong.

Finally, if your intended project comes with built-in flexibility, so that its design or function can be adapted to suit different people in different ways at different times, you are keeping the maximum number of potential buyers on side. The best thing you can do is seek the expert advice of a design company who are dealing in high-end renovations and developments all the time. They will soon be able to set you straight on what looks suspiciously like a white elephant, and what is likely to be your cash cow.

Get in touch with Rive Gauche to discuss your next project and whether your renovation desires will stand the test of time.