The housing stock in Highgate
Georgian houses around the village, large Victorian villas and modernist houses on the Holly Lodge and Highpoint sides.
Highgate sits under Camden and Haringey conservation controls, and the village core carries some of London's tightest heritage cover. Delivery here is about heritage-grade refurbishment, discreet contemporary rear extensions and services strip-outs that leave the fabric of the house better than we found it. Our teams work in the village weekly.
Most of our Highgate instructions come from owners of the grove georgian houses, highgate village townhouses, west hill and merton lane detached houses, and from clients moving between Hampstead, Kentish Town, Crouch End, Muswell Hill who already know the type of building they are buying into.
Planning and consent with the London Borough of Camden and the London Borough of Haringey
The Highgate Conservation Area spans the boundary between two boroughs, and the village core includes a high concentration of listed buildings.
Which council you deal with can depend on which side of the street you are on. We confirm that before any drawing is produced.
Our approach is the same every time: establish the constraints before anything is designed, agree the route to consent with the client, and price the job against the scheme that will actually be approved rather than the one that looks best on a first sketch.
The work we carry out in Highgate
The bulk of our Highgate work is listed house refurbishment, extensions and garden rooms, roof restoration and structural repair.
Heritage refurbishment. Whole-house refurbishment of listed and locally listed Highgate houses, with lime plaster, correct joinery profiles and conservation officer sign-off.
Rear and side-return extensions. Glazed and steel-frame extensions designed to sit quietly behind Highgate's protected frontages.
Basement and lightwell. Underpinning and lightwell excavation coordinated with structural engineer and party-wall surveyor on the payroll.
Access, neighbours and running a tidy site
Steep gradients affect scaffold design and concrete delivery. We survey access before pricing.
Every trade on a Highgate project is directly employed by Ushii. There is no chain of outside firms to chase, no pricing surprises when a trade turns up, and one team responsible for the work from strip-out to snagging.
Realistic programmes in Highgate
Nine to fifteen months for a full house project.
Those figures assume consent is in place and decisions are made when they are asked for. The single biggest cause of delay on prime London projects is not construction, it is a client decision waiting on a specification that was never finalised. We front-load those choices into the programme so they are made calmly rather than under pressure.
Talk to us about your Highgate project
If you are planning work on a property in Highgate or nearby in Hampstead, Kentish Town, Crouch End, Muswell Hill, the useful first step is a site visit. We will walk the building, tell you what the council is likely to want, and give you an honest view of cost and programme before you commit to drawings.
Get in touch through the contact page and a director will arrange to meet you at the property.