Full House Renovation Cost in London: Why the Band Is So Wide

The most misleading thing about renovation pricing in London is a single number pretending to be an answer. A full house renovation runs £160 to £350 per square foot, a band wide enough that quoting the middle of it would tell you nothing. The width is not vagueness. It is the honest shape of the market, and understanding what puts a project at each end is worth more than any headline figure.

What £160 to £350 per square foot actually describes

The band covers renovating a whole house end to end: strip-out, services rewired and re-plumbed, walls, floors and ceilings renewed, bathrooms and kitchen replaced, decorated throughout. At the lower end sits work to an honest, durable family standard with sensible specification choices. At the upper end sits deeper intervention, structural alteration, full-height joinery, stone, underfloor heating throughout, where the finish itself becomes the project.

The single biggest driver is not size but depth: how much of the existing house survives. A renovation that keeps the plan and renews the surfaces sits low in the band. One that moves the stair, opens the rear and re-imagines the plan sits high, because every moved wall drags structure, services and finishes along with it.

When the band does not apply

Honesty requires the caveat most cost guides skip: £160 to £350 per square foot describes entry-to-mid level renovation. Heavy structural scope, and prime central addresses like Mayfair, Knightsbridge and Belgravia, start at £450 to £500 per square foot, and a super prime finish runs £500 to £800. If your project is a lateral apartment behind a listed façade with full bespoke joinery, the entry band is simply the wrong tool, and any builder quoting inside it is telling you something worrying about what they intend to build.

If the project grows upward as well as inward, a loft conversion prices at £250 to £300 per square foot on the same discipline, our guide covers it in the same honest terms. Wherever your project sits, the earlier a real figure enters the conversation, the fewer surprises survive to the site: nuprojects.co.uk.

How to use the band before you have drawings

Take your internal area, multiply by both ends of the honest band for your level of work, and treat the result as the envelope every design decision has to live inside. Done this early, the arithmetic disciplines the design rather than the design shocking the budget. It is also the fastest way to test a quote: a number far outside the band, in either direction, needs a very good explanation.

The other early decision is the route: the architect-led and design and build routes distribute risk differently, and on a whole-house project the gaps between separate firms are where budgets quietly die.

A loft conversion added to the same programme is usually cheaper than building it as a separate project later, one scaffold, one team, one disruption.

One team, one contract, one number

NU Projects is a design and build practice established in 2010, with over 100 prime central London projects delivered. Architecture, interior design, project management and construction under a single contract means the figure you agree is carried by one accountable team from first drawing to handover. Bring us your address and your ambitions and we will tell you, plainly, where in the band your project genuinely sits: nuprojects.co.uk · 020 7731 6841.

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Want to know where in the band your house actually sits? Book a consultation or call 020 7731 6841. Send us the address and your internal area, and we will give you an honest bracket before anyone draws a line.