Loft bedroom and en-suite in a working household

The loft had been converted years earlier and then used as storage. It had a floor, a staircase and a window, and that was it.

The complication was not the work, it was the household. Two people working from home on video calls all day, in a house where the only route to the loft is the main staircase. So the programme was built around them: noisy work confined to agreed windows, the staircase sheeted and protected every single day, and a dust barrier at first floor level maintained for the whole three weeks.

The en-suite went into the eaves where the ceiling was too low to stand anyway — a shower, a WC and a wall-hung basin, with the soil connection dropped down through a bulkhead in the bedroom below that we formed and made invisible.

Fitted wardrobes run along both eaves, which is the only sensible use of that space, and turn a room with two-thirds usable headroom into one that feels generous.