Plans have been submitted to convert 40 Garfield Road – a terrace house about half way along the street, just to the right of the white one pictured above – to an 8-bedroom, 14-person House in Multiple Occupation (HMO) spread over four storeys. The house was sold in a Savills property auction in November last year, for £950,000. It’s currently a three-storey terraced house, spread over three floors with over 1,700 square feet of space, split in to six bedrooms (though a couple of the current rooms are tiny boxrooms at the back), with two bathrooms and a small paved back garden. It’s currently a bit tired and dated, but in reasonable overall condition – we’ve seen much worse!

The new owners – who seem to be running the development via a dedicated company called Clapham Residential Ltd – first applied for planning permission to extend the house in May, getting approval to add an extension to the rear as well as raise the back of the roof to enlarge some of the tiniest rooms (and increase the number of bedrooms to eight). This sort of extension isn’t unusual for the street, and the Council confirmed that this was a ‘permitted development’ (i.e. that it fell within the scope of extensions to buildings that you’re allowed to do without needing to get planning permission).

Then in July the new owners put another application in to reorganise the inside of the property, to turn it in to an HMO – based on the enlarged property, with six two-person rooms and two one-person ones. HMOs are properties rented out by at least three people who are not from one ‘household’ (for example a family) but share facilities like the bathroom and kitchen; they are usually ‘let by the room’ rather than as an overall tenancy for the property. Under the proposals for 40 Garfield Road, five of the rooms would have small en suite bathrooms, with the rest sharing, and there are three shared kitchen / living rooms scattered around the house (which in principle would not be allowed to be used as further bedrooms).

HMOs can work well – they tend to offer small scale accommodation to those who would find it hard to stretch to a larger property, and in London their status of being something between a room in a flatshare and a fully self contained flat can appeal to young professionals, as well as to the wealthier end of the student market – and the past businesses of the people behind the Clapham Residential company profile suggest they have a fair bit of prior experience in similar room letting ventures. The going rates for accommodation round here suggest that it would be in a developer’s interest to aim for the upper end of the market, to make what would be a pretty healthy income from the building. That said, HMOs can also be a bit of a nightmare if they’re not closely managed and the tenants are not picked carefully – and there are a few other HMOs in the wider Lavender Hill area that are run at the bottom end of the range, where the landlords spend as little as possible while cramming as many people in as they can – which are notorious for chaos, and cause real headaches for the neighbours and aren’t much fun for their residents. Whichever route this one takes, it would undoubtedly turn the house in to a notably densely inhabited property – few of these houses currently hold 14 people! – and add a fair bit of new population to the street on one go.

The planning application argued that the development was within permitted development rules (which the property extension is) – but permission is still needed for a change of use. However, while we were writing this post the application was withdrawn – which sometimes is because there has been negative feedback from the planning officers – but which can be for lots of other reasons as well, including developers wanting to update plans. Something will happen to the property, so we suspect revised plans will be back in the relatively near future. If you want to see what was proposed, go to wandsworth.gov.uk/planning and search for application 2023/2385 – which was seeking approval for “Alterations including erection of single storey rear extension and dormer roof extension to main rear roof in connection with change of use from dwelling house (Class C3) to House of multiple occupation (Class C4).“

If you’re interested in development plans in the Lavender Hill area you may find our other posts on planning policy of interest, as well as our occasional series on local development projects.