What Good Design Adds: A Listed Flat near Baker Street

When a listed flat we refurbished near Baker Street went back on the market, it was priced at almost double what our clients had paid for it. The rising market did some of that work. The design and the build did the rest, and our clients came out just over £1m better off.

It’s a good reminder of something we tell clients often. A good interior designer doesn’t just make a home nicer to live in. Done properly, the same decisions make it worth more.

Living well and adding value are the same job

Most people treat these as two separate goals. One is about how a home feels on an ordinary Tuesday. The other is about the number an estate agent writes down when you sell. In practice they come from the same place: a layout that works, materials that last, and money spent where people can see and feel it.

With a listed building you can’t simply add space. The value has to come from what you do with the rooms you already have.

More space isn’t always more value

An architect will tell you how to get the most square footage out of a building. That’s their job, and it’s useful. But the most square footage isn’t always the best value.

One set of clients was advised to dig down at the front of their house and give the basement a bay window, turning it into a habitable room. On paper, it’s sound advice, and they were keen. In reality, they already had more bedrooms upstairs than they used. What they actually wanted the basement for was a cinema room.

Follow that through. Around £9,000 to dig down and put the windows in. Then around £3,500 on blackout blinds so they could watch films in the daytime, covering the windows they’d just paid for. Meanwhile, the space outside the front door has gone. The bins now live in the garden and get wheeled through the house on collection day, and with a baby at home there’s nowhere to leave the pram while you get the front door open.

A windowed basement was expected to add between £8,000 and £12,000 to the value of the house. For them, it wasn’t worth it. Leaving it undone also means a future buyer pays for a house with ‘potential’, which, slightly perversely, adds to the price on its own.

What the numbers looked like

We’ve worked with a number of clients on flats bought to rent out or sell on, and the results hold up.

A converted ballroom flat we refurbished in Earl’s Court sold for more than 60% above its original value. The rest of the street went up around 20%. Our clients spent about 10% of the property’s value on the design and the works combined, so the profit was a very tidy one.

The flat near Baker Street told the same story. Almost double its last sale price, in a building where the listing ruled out most of the obvious ways to add space.

Where the value actually comes from

Rarely from one big move. In our experience it’s the build-up of decisions that buyers feel without being able to name: storage that’s built in rather than bolted on later, a bedroom that’s calm because nothing in it is competing for attention, materials that still look right ten years on.

In this flat, even the art was made for the room. We commissioned a bespoke triptych to pull together every colour and texture in the scheme, from the walnut joinery to the silk rug. You can read how that piece came together in our post on the bespoke artwork for this project.

More from this flat

There’s more to this project than the sale price: what being listed meant for the design, how the layout was worked out around the original proportions, and the detail that went into every room. We’ve written that up in full in A Listed Flat near Baker Street: Interior Design in Marylebone.

If you’re weighing up where to spend on a home you may one day sell, the short version is this. Spend on how it lives, not on what it adds up to on paper. The two tend to meet in the end. There’s more on our work in the area on our Baker Street interior design page.