Full ground floor refurbishment | Letchworth Garden City

The ground floor refurbishment focused on creating a cohesive, practical finish across the newly opened-up space. Our brief covered the full refurbishment of the kitchen, dining and living areas, alongside the creation of a dedicated utility area to keep everyday household tasks separate from the main kitchen. The result is a modern, well-connected ground floor where each area has a clear purpose while flowing naturally into the next.

The finish level was high throughout, with a lot of the detail built in rather than bought in, which is where most of the work went.

The decision that shapes everything else here was running a single poured resin floor across the whole ground floor. No thresholds, no change of material at doorways, no trims, the same seamless surface from the office through the kitchen, living and dining rooms.

It's what makes an open plan actually read as open. It's also the least forgiving finish you can specify. Resin needs a substrate that is genuinely level and genuinely dry, it goes down as a continuous pour, and it can't be patched invisibly afterwards. Everything underneath it, levelling, insulation, any services in the floor, has to be finished and signed off before it's laid, because there is no going back once it's down.

That means the whole programme is built around it. Getting the sequencing right on a floor like this is most of the job.

The office desk run, the recessed television panel, the floating shelf beneath it and the full-height storage wall in the kitchen are all made for the room rather than ordered to fit it. That's the difference you notice without being able to name it: cabinetry that finishes tight to the wall at both ends, shadow gaps that stay parallel, and no filler panels covering the gap where a standard unit didn't quite reach.

It takes longer and it costs more. On a job where the floor and the walls are this plain, it's also the only place the quality can show.