Self-Contained Rooftop Flat, Crouch End N8

Crouch End, London (N8)
Private client (anonymised) · 2018

The brief

The goal was a brand-new, self-contained one-bedroom flat in the airspace above an existing building in Crouch End, a complete independent home with its own entrance, kitchen and bathroom, not just extra rooms. In a dense North London street, doing that conventionally would have meant months of disruption to the floors below. The project was designed by Haines Phillips Architects, who chose the Moduloft off-site method to deliver it.

What we did

Working with Haines Phillips Architects, we designed and built a complete new top-floor flat off-site in our North Yorkshire factory, then craned it into place. The new floor created a self-contained one-bedroom flat with its own kitchen and sitting room, utility, bedroom and bathroom, served by a new staircase and its own Worcester-Bosch boiler. Finished in Spanish blue slate with a 6.8-metre rear dormer, it was built with an acoustic floating floor and 60-minute fire separation between the new flat and the home below, signed off by building control before installation.

Because the work created a genuinely new, independent dwelling, the project qualified for zero-rated VAT. We coordinated the full London logistics too, traffic management, a crane licence and 27 parking-bay suspensions, to get a factory-built flat craned into a tight Crouch End street.

The result

A brand-new, self-contained one-bedroom flat where there was only roof before, a saleable, income-producing home created in unused airspace, delivered with factory precision and a fraction of the disruption a conventional build would have caused the occupants below. It’s a project we delivered hand-in-hand with the architects, and one they feature among their own work, which says something money can’t buy: the professionals who specify how buildings go together chose the off-site method, on design as well as delivery.