Holloway Road House Conversion

The brief was to convert a two-up, two-down Victorian terrace in Holloway into a two-storey family home, extending the plan at ground floor and rationalising a warren of cellular rooms that had been patched together over a century of occupancy. The existing building was measured, surveyed, and stripped back to its structure before a single line of intent was drawn: one open living floor, three bedrooms above, and a stair relocated to run the full height of the house without stealing usable room from either level.

Everything was authored in a single Revit model. The discipline split was enforced through worksets rather than separate files — Architecture, Structure, MEP, and Existing Fabric — so the survey geometry and the proposals could live side by side and be phased against one another. Dimension sets were locked to the brick coursing on the party walls, sheets were organised around a 010, 020, 030 sequence by drawing type, and every shared parameter fed a schedule that kept doors, windows, and ironmongery in one auditable place. At IFC export the model closed with zero warnings.

Coordination with the structural engineer

The rear extension and the new stair opening both cut into the original spine wall, which is a shared party wall with the neighbouring terrace. Coordination here was forensic: the structural engineer worked in their own Revit model and we exchanged it weekly, federating against ours in Navisworks before anything was ever drawn up. Beam pockets, padstone positions, and the lintel line above the new ground-floor opening were checked to a 25 mm clash tolerance, with the steelwork set 10 mm clear of the inner leaf to protect the damp-proof course.

The party-wall constraint meant the stair could not overhang the neighbour’s volume at all — every landing had to land within our own footprint.

Drawing set

The issue-for-construction set ran to seventeen sheets: location and existing drawings, demolition and new-build plans at 1:50, sections at 1:20 and 1:5, elevations, and a full suite of junction details. The stair detail sheet — string, treads, and the trimmer beam where the stair passes the old chimney breast — went through four revisions with the framer before it left the office. Enscape was used for the client visuals, but the real proof of the model was the drawings themselves: nothing on the sheets was drafted twice, because nothing on the sheets was drawn at all.

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The house was handed over on programme and the contractor’s feedback loop was unusually quiet — the few site queries that did arrive were answered by pushing the parameter updates back through the model rather than editing a sheet in isolation. The model, at closeout, became the as-built record, with warranty data attached to every piece of plant. It was the kind of job that proves the technician’s point: if the information is right the first time, the drawing set is almost a by-product.