Built-Ins near you

If you own a flat on a long lease, the lease almost certainly contains a covenant preventing alterations or improvements without the landlord's licence or consent. Built-in joinery fixed to walls is an alteration in the ordinary sense, and whether the lease catches your particular project depends on its wording, which is why reading the alterations clause is the first step rather than an afterthought.

Where the lease contains a covenant against making improvements without licence or consent, section 19(2) of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1927 deems it to be subject to a proviso that the licence or consent is not to be unreasonably withheld. That does not make consent automatic, and the same subsection preserves the landlord's right to require payment of a reasonable sum for any damage to or diminution in the value of the premises or neighbouring premises belonging to the landlord, and of any legal or other expenses properly incurred in connection with the licence or consent. Where the improvement does not add to the letting value, the landlord may also, where reasonable, require an undertaking to reinstate the premises to their previous condition.

The practical consequence is a paper trail worth building deliberately: a written request with drawings, a written consent or licence to alter, and a copy kept with the lease documents. A buyer's solicitor will ask about alterations, and unconsented work is a common cause of delay at sale. Managing agents also frequently ask for evidence of the contractor's public liability insurance and for working hours to be agreed, both of which are easier to supply before the joiner is standing in the lobby.

The internal layout of a flat is designed around escape, and Approved Document B volume 1 sets out how. In a flat with a storey more than 4.5m above ground level, one accepted approach is a protected entrance hall of at least REI 30 serving all the habitable rooms; another is to plan the flat so that the travel distance from the flat entrance door to any point in any habitable room is no more than 9m, with cooking facilities remote from the main entrance door and not impeding the escape route.

Built-in furniture can disturb both of those without anyone noticing. A run of storage that narrows a protected hall, a media wall built across an alternative exit, a bench that obstructs a door, or a partition that turns a habitable room into an inner room all change the arrangement the flat was approved on. So does replacing or altering the flat entrance door, which in many buildings is a fire doorset performing a specific job for the whole block.

That door has become a regulated item in its own right in taller buildings. The Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022, which came into force on 23 January 2023, require the responsible person in multi-occupied residential buildings with storeys over 11 metres to carry out quarterly checks of fire doors in the common parts and, on a best endeavours basis, annual checks of flat entrance doors that open onto the common parts, and to give residents information about keeping doors closed and not tampering with self-closing devices. A joiner adjusting or removing a self-closer to make a built-in fit is undoing something that is being formally checked.

Alcoves are almost never a matching pair, and pretending otherwise produces the two commonest complaints about alcove joinery: cupboards that are visibly different widths, and doors whose reveals taper against the wall. A good maker measures both recesses at several heights, designs the two units separately, and hides the difference in scribes and in where the shelves stop rather than in the door gaps.

Chimney breasts raise a different question. Where a breast has been removed downstairs at some point in the past, the masonry above it must be supported by something, and it is not unknown to find it corbelled or propped in a way nobody documented. A joiner opening up an alcove is often the first person to look at it in decades. If what is above looks unsupported, that is a structural engineer's question before it is a joinery one, and it is not a job to build a bookcase against and forget.

Behind the plaster there is usually something else worth finding first: cables running vertically down to a socket, a gas pipe to a fire that was capped rather than removed, or a buried flue. Older properties also bring the general precaution HSE applies to any building built or refurbished before 2000, which is that materials disturbed during work may contain asbestos. A joiner who stops and asks rather than carrying on is doing the right thing.

Built-in work is priced in hours, and hours are consumed by irregularity. The variables are the number of separate pieces, how far the walls, floor and ceiling deviate from square, whether existing mouldings have to be matched or reinstated, the front construction and finish, whether anything has to be boxed around or made accessible, whether the work happens on site or in a workshop, and what has to be stripped out and made good first. In a flat, add lift access, protection of common parts and the time spent obtaining consent.

LokalMatch connects you to the people who do this work. Describe the piece once with your postcode, with a photograph of the space and rough dimensions, and joiners and fitted furniture makers covering your area will be in touch. It is free for homeowners, and the businesses pay for the requests they receive. LokalMatch does not build anything, does not set prices and does not vet, rank or recommend the businesses who reply, so checking insurance and looking at finished work in person is still worth the afternoon.