Maximising living space: side return extension ideas to transform your home without compromising garden size

Extending into the side return brings longed-for extra living space, flexibility and light into the home.
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Ruth Bloomfield19 June 2020

Step forward the side return, the sliver of space at the back of many Victorian and Edwardian houses which was once used as an entrance to an outside lavatory and a place to store coal or wood.

Today these precious little pieces of outside space are a glorious opportunity to make a difference to a back room.

Extending sideways into them can widen out a traditionally long, slim kitchen to dramatic effect — without compromising the size of your garden, as a traditional rear extension will.

Depending on the size of the home, a side return extension will add about 80 to 100sq ft of extra living space, perhaps for a kitchen-diner and entertaining area.

Dark rooms can be lit with larger windows and skylights, and the flow between house and garden will be smoother.

A side return extension is a relatively simple project with many choices of design. Here are three of the best treatments:

Industrial chic

A move from a loft apartment in New York to a Victorian cottage in Peckham was something of a culture shock to the owners of a narrow period house that came with a tired, small, dark kitchen at the back.

John Norman, director of Mustard Architects in Hackney Wick, decided the answer was to extend into the side return, adding almost 120sq ft of extra space, and almost doubling the width of the room in the process to 15ft 6in.

“Our clients really wanted the industrial look, so we used Crittall windows and doors, reused bricks from the side wall on the new back wall, used concrete for floors and painted the walls, including brickwork, all white,” says Norman.

The kitchen of this Victorian home in Peckham was given an industrial-style makeover 
Tim Crocker

The roof of the side return is sloping because planning rules restricted the height of the side wall.

“The only way to get some height above the dining area was to have a pitched roof,” he explains.

A wide gap created between the front living room and kitchen helps link the two spaces, while the issue of light has been solved by adding a run of new skylights.

Kitchen units are birch plywood stained an unusually dark purple tone, with industrial steel work surfaces.

Although the £100,000 project was carried out in 2013, it still looks very contemporary.

Making a statement

Concrete pillars and cantilevered cabinets helped turn a typical north London Victorian terrace house into a bold architectural statement.

The owners of the Crouch End property wanted to create a calm but interesting space for entertaining and called in Paul Archer Design of Farringdon.

Project architect Richard Gill felt the side return was the key to expanding the kitchen the full width of the back of the house, adding 97sq ft of space.

The original kitchen was crammed into a long, narrow room. It was re-sited within the side return, leaving the original kitchen space as a dining area — with a wall of hugely useful storage cabinets — leading via a new sliding door to the living room at the front of the house.

The original kitchen was re-sited in the new side extension 
Will Pryce

Gill decided to use board-marked concrete as a motif for the design, leaving the support pillars and beams on view. This type of concrete is less expensive than polished concrete and it has more texture.

Outside, a pillar juts out beyond the extent of the house, offering shade and privacy to the patio, while a large concrete planter has been installed beneath the kitchen window.

The floors are done in large, good-value porcelain tiles that are hard-wearing and match the colour of the concrete.

The house stands on a sloping site so a step down was added from living room to kitchen.

Gill left the side return area at the slightly higher level so that he could cantilever a row of kitchen cabinets built of sprayed MDF on the overhang, creating a shadow gap beneath them and enhancing the feeling of space.

The oiled oak-clad storage cupboards have been cantilevered in the same way.

To maximise light, the back wall was replaced with a large glass sliding door and a long skylight was installed above the kitchen.

Although this skylight appears to lie flat it was built on a slight slope to allow rain and snow to run off.

The build cost for this well-considered side return project, with huge attention to detail, was £170,000 excluding VAT and professional fees but including redecoration of the living room, a new utility room in the understairs cupboard and new flooring on the ground floor and outside.

Creating space with maximum flexibility

Most people use their side return to create a bigger kitchen. But Charles Tashima, director of Charles Tashima Architecture in Finsbury Park took a different and highly effective, approach at a period house in Hampstead.

“We wanted to maximise the flexibility of the space,” he says. “If it was a kitchen you would just end up with a bigger kitchen. What we have now is a big, multi-use room.”

This big, multi-use room is the result of a side return extension in Hampstead by Charles Tashima Architecture
Oliver Perrott

This project moved the kitchen to the middle of the house — where you would normally find a dining room — and created a large family living room behind it, overlooking the garden and with zones for dining, reading, socialising and relaxing.

Although the side return added only around 6ft to the width of the room and a total of 118sq ft to the 312sq ft space, the difference in the feel of its dimensions is “huge”.

The house already had a rear extension and local planning restrictions prevented Tashima pushing further out into the garden, but his use of a bay window in the side return, with a comfortable window seat tucked into it, makes the room feel longer.

Metal French doors, with panels of green and yellow glass to blend with the garden, were installed to give access to the outdoors, while a series of skylights add to the natural light in the room.

To enhance the flexibility of the space, Tashima kept a small section of wall to divide the window seat from the rest of the room, creating open but private spaces to relax in.

The choice of materials was particularly important in this project, which cost around £250 per square foot.

“For us it is really important that there is atmosphere and comfort,” explains Tashima.

To achieve this aim, he used reclaimed oak floorboards and timber from an old pine fence as wall panelling, “which work perfectly with the owner’s artwork, books and antique furniture”.

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