Room is rarely the problem here. The real question in Kingswood is usually how far to take it.
Kingswood is about four miles from our office, straight up the A217 over the top of Reigate Hill, which puts our vans on site in roughly a quarter of an hour. Past the crest the character changes quickly. Brighton Road runs through the middle of the village, the little station on the Tattenham Corner branch sits below it, and the roads leading off, Waterhouse Lane, Furze Hill and the drives around Kingswood Warren, disappear between pines, oaks and rhododendrons. Houses stand well back on plots measured in acres, often behind gates and a long gravel approach. Lower Kingswood is strung along the main road a mile south, closer to us again, and to the west the boundary blurs into the Tadworth border and Walton on the Hill. Drop off the escarpment and you are into Buckland and the Weald, a different world for anyone digging a hole.
What we are asked to do here reflects that. Very little of our KT20 work is a modest job. It tends to be a substantial rear or side extension on a house that already has five bedrooms, a full refurbishment of a property untouched for thirty years, or a replacement dwelling on a plot that deserves better than the bungalow sitting on it. Kitchens open into garden rooms, garages become annexes, and roofs that were only ever storage turn into a proper top floor. Bigger houses mean longer programmes and more to coordinate, which is the kind of work we set up to run. You can see the shape of it in our recent projects.
The ground repays attention. Kingswood sits on the chalk of the North Downs with clay and flints capping it in patches, so the depth a foundation needs can change from one end of a plot to the other. Soakaways sometimes work beautifully and sometimes do not, and the only honest way to know is to dig and test. Mature trees are everywhere and many are protected, which brings root protection areas and engineered foundations into the design. Services matter too. Long private drives mean long runs for water, power and drainage, older houses out towards Mogador may be on oil or a private treatment plant, and three phase supplies and pumped stations turn up more here than anywhere else we work.
Planning sits with Reigate and Banstead Borough Council, the same authority that covers our own address in Reigate. Two things shape most schemes here. The first is the Kingswood conservation area, which removes some permitted development rights and puts far more weight on materials, roof lines, windows and boundary treatments. The second is the Metropolitan Green Belt around the village, where the size of any addition is judged against the original house rather than against what has already been added over the years. Tree preservation orders sit across both. None of that stops good work, it simply means the design has to be right before it goes in. We are builders, not architects. Where you have an architect we work alongside them and give them the buildability and cost picture early. Where you do not, we can introduce you to architects we trust.
We are a Reigate design and build company and Ian has been building in this part of Surrey since 1996. We are CHAS Accredited, SSIP Assessed and fully insured, and the work is carried out by our own skilled craftsmen and trades we have used for two decades. Groundworks, structure, roofing, joinery, kitchens, bathrooms and decorating come under one contract with one written price, so there is nobody to chase. There is more about the company here.
