Kitchen Renovations for South East London

A conversation before a commitment

Every kitchen we design starts as a conversation, but every renovation has an engineering reality underneath it: pipework, floor joists, radiator runs, sometimes a wall that isn't as optional as it looks. Get that groundwork wrong and no amount of considered cabinetry fixes it later. Get it right, and the design work that follows has something solid to stand on.

That's the order we work in at Puccini: understand the room before we dress it.

How we design
TODO: describe this kitchen, e.g. handleless oak kitchen with open shelving and integrated lighting

Where renovations usually go wrong

Most kitchen renovations don't fail on style, they fail on sequencing. Someone falls for a beautiful island before anyone's checked where the radiator's going, or a wall comes out before anyone's confirmed what it was holding up.

The unglamorous groundwork protects the exciting part. A proper site visit tells us what's behind the plaster and under the floor before a single unit is ordered, so the layout you fall in love with is one we can actually build.

The details worth getting right

Taste isn't usually what makes or breaks a renovation… Here's where we pay the most attention.

Installation

Choosing the right team

A kitchen fitted quickly and cheaply tends to need fixing twice: once by the original team, once by whoever comes after them. It's a false economy that costs more than the saving was ever worth.

Our installers are the same people who've worked alongside Andrew for years, not whoever came in lowest for the week. That continuity is also what keeps the small logistics right (ordering enough tile to allow for cuts and breakages, scheduling trades in the right order) so nothing holds up the job.

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Layout and planning

The parts that get decided too late

Lighting and radiators are usually an afterthought, sorted out once the units are in and there's nowhere sensible left to put them. We plan them at the layout stage instead: where a pendant needs to sit over an island, or where a radiator can go without eating into cupboard space.

The ceiling gets the same attention. It's easy to spend a renovation budget on everything at eye level and forget the fifth wall, but the right plan overhead can make a kitchen feel twice the size, or twice as calm.

Our Design Process

Period properties

Working with what's already there

A lot of the kitchens we design sit in South East London's Victorian and Edwardian terraces, where the temptation is to strip everything back and start again. We'd rather work with what's good about the house than fight it.

Original floorboards, cornicing, a fireplace that's survived a hundred years of family life: these are worth keeping wherever they can be. A squeaky board is rarely a reason to tear one up.

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What Customers Say

Start the conversation

If you're planning a kitchen renovation in South East London, come and talk to Andrew at the Brockley studio. Bring the awkward bits, the structural questions, the "can we really move that wall" doubts, and we'll work through them together.

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Download our brochure