Bargain basement: how one couple added £200k to a 'broken' basement flat in Hackney

Basement flats are a challenge and they get a bad press: dark, dank and gloomy. But Cat Botibol and Merlin Mason prove that living at eye level with a London pavement can be bright and light — and that basements aren’t something to turn up your nose at.

Four years ago Cat, 38, chief executive of advertising agency PD3, was single and living alone in the one-bedroom Hackney flat she’d owned since 2009.

“I just got a bit lonely,” she says. “By 2014 the property market had boomed a bit, the Olympics had happened, new Tube stations in the area had opened and prices had gone a bit crazy.”

This craziness allowed her to sell the flat that she’d bought for £295,000 for £450,000 and reinvest the equity in a three-bedroom flat on the basement and ground floors of a Victorian house, also in Hackney.

The £670,000 property had been tenanted since the Eighties and was in a miserable state.

“It’d had loads of bodge repairs, it was beige and brown and the kitchen was very weird, with a wood-panelled ceiling. The living room had plastic laminate flooring glued down on it.”

Small windows at the back meant the flat’s vital main light source was wasted. But at 1,350sq ft, the property is the size of a family house. Unusually high ceilings make it feel even bigger.

“I love basement flats,” says Cat. “You get a lot more for your money than you do on upper floors, and you usually get the garden.”

Cat moved in, enlisting an old university friend to take a spare room, and got on with work and life. Then she met Merlin, 33, who runs ThanksBox, a software and consultancy firm for start-ups.

By 2015 the couple decided to set up home together but Merlin, who had a new-build shared-ownership flat, refused to live in Cat’s “broken and mouldy” basement.

WORKING TOGETHER

They agreed on a joint renovation project: “That way it would feel like it was our house, rather than Cat’s house,” explains Merlin. Their approach to finding an architect was simple but highly effective.

They went through several years of shortlists for the Don’t Move, Improve! awards, run by New London Architecture to discover the capital’s best and most innovative new home extension projects.

They searched schemes they liked that had been achieved on an economical budget, and settled on architects Poulsom Middlehurst, admiring their “light and clean” designs and their track record in modernising Victorian houses.

During 2016 the architects worked on plans for the flat and applied for planning permission to enlarge the windows on the ground floor, including in the bathroom.

By January last year Cat and Merlin were ready to move into a rented house and for work to start with a building firm that they had also found via the Don’t Move, Improve! shortlists.

The first few weeks of work were tough. “Every time we spoke to the builders they had discovered something wrong with the flat,” says Cat. “For starters, the joists under the bathroom were all rotten and had to be replaced. But that is what it is like with an old house.”

BUDGET LIMITATIONS

Once the ground floor had been gutted and reinforced with steels, however, the excited couple began to see their home taking shape. Interestingly, they decided not to extend outward into their large garden.

“I just thought, this is more than enough space for us,” adds Cat. “Our budget was limited and if we had extended out, we would have had to cut back on other things.”

They totally gutted the lower floor of the flat, enlarging the size of the main kitchen-living room, replacing its grubby floors with wide wooden floorboards and painting the walls white.

The white and stainless steel kitchen, from Ikea, is tucked neatly beneath the eye-catching plywood staircase to the upper floor, with its distinctive bespoke geometric balustrade.

The entire back wall of the flat was removed and replaced with floor-to-ceiling glass doors leading out to the large, sloping back garden.

For these glass doors, Cat and Merlin chose the largest “off the peg” sizes available rather than go the made to measure route, in order to keep costs down. One of the huge supporting steels remained visible, so it was painted a deep green.

The property still has three bedrooms and two bathrooms. One en suite bedroom, leading off the living room, is occupied by Cat and Merlin’s lodger, while upstairs at ground-floor level are the other two large bedrooms and the main bathroom.

The original window of this bathroom overlooks the garden and has been enlarged. In addition, a new window has been added above the bathroom door to direct light into the formerly dark hallway, while original sash windows have been retained in both of the ground-floor bedrooms.

COUNTING THE COSTS

Merlin and Cat’s lease on their rental house ran out last April, before the work on their home was complete, so they moved back in when the flat was in a distinctly unfinished state, lacking running water for the first few days. By mid-May the work was largely done.

Their budget started at £70,000 but when they hired architects they began to understand the true costs. They ended up nearly doubling their spend to £130,000 — but the property is now worth about £1 million.

“We were told that to make money we should have turned the upstairs bathroom into a bedroom, and made a bathroom between the two larger bedrooms — but we didn’t want to sell and we were more than happy,” says Cat. “We got just what we wanted.”