Homes & shared stairs

Private rooms and the route that serves them

Homes, flats and landlord decoration is the note for space the resident or the instructing owner controls inside the demise: walls, ceilings, internal doors, the inner faces of shutters, and joinery the household uses, specified room by room. It covers an owner’s refresh and a letting instruction alike, provided the message says who approves the work, who holds the key, and whether anyone is still living there. It does not quietly include the landing outside the flat, the outer face of a sash the lease reserves, or the street door of a mansion block. Shared stairs and entrances is the note for that common route. It describes flights, landings, strings and balusters, and the door faces the building’s representative has actually included. A polished handrail stays protected unless the instruction says it is to be coated. Red Lion Square’s later red-brick mansion blocks, recorded in the Bloomsbury appraisal, and the council homes on the Bourne Estate at Leather Lane, are two Holborn settings where a flat sits behind an entrance the resident does not control. Lincoln’s Inn also contains residential flats as well as chambers. In each case the private note and the stair note stay separate because the right to instruct them is not the same right.

Sources: Camden: Bloomsbury conservation appraisal; Camden: homes at the Bourne Estate; Lincoln’s Inn: the estate

Where the flat specification must stop

Stop the home note at the demise unless a second person has put the common part in writing. A landlord refreshing a rental flat can specify stains, chipped door edges and a change of wall colour inside the rooms. A leak, a window that does not close, or a loose board is a defect for the appropriate trade, not a sentence added to the painting line. If the lease drawings or the agent’s rules exclude external window faces or the entrance door, leave them off the flat quotation even when they look tired from inside. The shared-stair note begins only when the freeholder, the council, the managing agent or another party entitled to instruct the common parts asks for them. A resident’s wish to have the landing painted is useful background. It is not the instruction. The stair note also refuses a pretence that decoration includes a fire-door survey. Seals, closers and labels are fittings that stay clear. A damaged door needs the right assessment before anyone decorates it. If offices and homes share the flights, say which group can accept daytime work and which still needs to pass. That conflict is the reason the stair has its own page, rather than a paragraph at the end of a flat specification.

What each enquiry should contain

For a home or a rental flat, send the address, the floor and the rooms in the order you would like them considered. Say which rooms can be emptied and which must keep a way through to cooking, washing and sleeping. Name floors and fittings that stay, so protection can be planned rather than assumed. If you work from the flat, say which hours the sequence has to respect, without personal detail beyond access. For a letting, name the owner or agent who will approve the specification, the keyholder, and whether the flat is empty. Tie requests to the condition notes you already have, and keep unresolved defects visible. Attach any building rule you have been given about hours, protection of shared landings, and deliveries. For a stair, the sender should be the party who can commission it, or should say they are asking on that party’s behalf. List the flights and landings in the names residents use, the door faces included, and the handrail if it is to be coated rather than covered. Say how people will pass while a flight is out of use, and where materials may stand so a landing does not become a store. Samples for a flat belong in that flat’s light. Samples for a stair belong on the landing, beside the fanlight, because a colour chosen upstairs can read differently at the entrance.

Access, noise and a route that cannot simply close

Both notes need an access story, and the stories are different. Inside a flat, the constraint is usually occupation: furniture that stays, a door the household must close, and dust kept out of a finished room. On a common stair, the constraint is that the building may have no other way out. Where the layout allows, one flight or one landing at a time is the practical discussion, agreed with the person who speaks for the building. Preparation that raises dust is often calmer from the top when the stair remains in use, so grit is not walked through a completed flight. Coating a tread needs a gap during which it is not walked on. That gap is a condition of the product and of the building’s hours. It is not a promise that the whole stair will be finished between one evening and the next morning. Camden and the City set different limits on noisy work, and an evening rub-down can fall outside those limits even when brushwork would not. A block that contains homes can be quieter, in the house rules, than the council’s maximum. Send the rule you have. On Lamb’s Conduit Street, where brick houses carry shops at pavement level, or on the south side of Great Ormond Street, where doorcases are decorative timber, be explicit about whether the enquiry is the home, the shop, or the shared door. The neighbourhood notes explain the setting. These two service notes explain who is allowed to include each surface.

Sources: Camden: noisy building works; City of London: construction noise; Camden: Bloomsbury conservation appraisal