The brief
Like a lot of homes of its age, this North Yorkshire house had rooms that worked on their own but didn’t work together. The owners wanted to open up the back of the house and gain a proper light-filled space that looked out over the garden, the sort of room a family actually lives in rather than passes through. The goal was more space, more light, and an extension that looked like it had always been part of the house rather than bolted on.
What we did
We built a single-storey extension across the rear of the property, and the priority from the first drawing was making it belong. We matched the brickwork to the existing house and carried the tiled roof line across so it ties in cleanly, which is the difference between an extension that looks considered and one that looks like an add-on. Get that junction wrong and the eye goes straight to it. Get it right and nobody notices, which is exactly the point.
The back wall is given over to a wide run of anthracite grey bi-fold doors, opening the whole room out onto the garden. On a good day they fold right back and the line between inside and out more or less disappears. Alongside them we fitted matching grey windows and a separate garden door, keeping the whole rear elevation consistent and smart.
Inside, we brought light down from above as well as in from the garden, with roof windows over the main space so it stays bright even when the doors are shut and the North Yorkshire weather’s doing its worst.
structural build: foundations, brickwork, roof, steelwork where the old external wall came out, glazing, and all the making good where new meets old. The kind of job where the finished room looks simple and calm precisely because a lot of careful work went into it that you can’t see.
The result
A bright, open room across the back of the house that’s transformed how the family uses the whole ground floor. More space, a proper connection to the garden, and an extension that sits so naturally against the original house you’d struggle to say where one ends and the other begins.