An award winning extension, and the house rebuilt around it.
Woodfield Road, Hertfordshire. LABC Building Excellence Awards 2025 Regional Winner and National Finalist Best Residential Extension, delivered under a single main contract.
Extended, then rebuilt around it.
Woodfield Road in Hertfordshire was extended and then comprehensively rebuilt, taking a detached house to 355 square metres and a specification that reads as new throughout. The work won LABC Building Excellence Awards 2025 Regional Winner and National Finalist Best Residential Extension.
Nationserv is a UK specialist insurance repair contractor delivering end to end building solutions, including home extensions and whole house renovation. A complex reinstatement and a whole house rebuild ask for the same thing from a contractor: work to an existing building you did not put up, a programme that holds, and somebody accountable for the joints between old and new.
On completion the accommodation runs to four bedrooms, every one of them with an ensuite, a master suite with its own dressing room, and a ground floor built around a kitchen and super room of nearly twelve metres. There is also a gym, an office, a boot room, a pantry and an entrance hallway that runs 11.31 metres through the plan.
Old and new, one building.
The difficulty on a project like this is not the new build element. It is every point where the new work meets the house that was already there. Extending and rebuilding at once means working to levels, tolerances and construction somebody else set, often decades earlier, and only discovering what they really are once things are opened up.
The elevation makes that harder, not easier. A standing seam metal roof is unforgiving: the seams have to run true across a hipped roof and continue correctly onto the single storey wing, and any deviation reads from the far end of the garden. Large format glazing is the same. Openings have to be formed square and to the millimetre, because a full height sliding door will not forgive a wall that is out, whether that wall is new or forty years old.
Neither is a specialist bolt-on at the end. Both depend on decisions taken during the survey and the structural work, months before the roofer or the glazier arrives on site. The measure of the finished job is that nobody can tell where the original house stopped.
Survey to handover.
Six stages under one main contract. On a rebuild the sequence is the programme, and it starts with finding out what is actually there. The finishes everybody eventually looks at are decided by work that gets buried long before anyone sees them.
Survey and opening up
The existing house surveyed and opened up so the rebuild was designed against real conditions rather than assumed ones. What is found here decides what can be retained and what has to be replaced.
Extension and structure
Extension groundworks and structure set out to tie into the existing house, with brick elevations built across new and retained work so the whole thing reads as one elevation.
Standing seam roof
Standing seam metal roof installed to the hipped main roof and carried across the single storey wing, with the seams set out to read consistently across both elements.
Glazing and apertures
Dark grey aluminium windows, full height sliding doors and large format picture windows installed into prepared openings, weathered and sealed to close the building envelope.
Services throughout
Electrical, plumbing and drainage renewed across the whole house, not only the new part, coordinated over four ensuites, a utility, a kitchen and a gym and signed off before any finishes went on.
Fit out and handover
Second fix, joinery, decoration and external works completed across old and new alike, with the house returned finished rather than returned with a snagging list attached to it.
On a job like this you are judged on what nobody can see. If anyone can point at the elevation and tell you where the old house stopped, the extension has failed.
Every line runs true.
A 3,822 square foot house on completion, extended and rebuilt. The garden elevation is where the work is judged: the standing seam roof runs clean across the hip and continues onto the single storey wing, and the glazing sits square in brickwork built to receive it. There is no visible seam between what was kept and what is new.
Inside, the plan does what a house of this size has to do. The kitchen and super room runs nearly twelve metres, the hallway runs eleven, and the four bedrooms each have their own ensuite so the first floor works without anybody queueing. The master suite carries its own dressing room and a bathroom larger than most second bedrooms.
All of it was delivered under a single main contract with one point of responsibility across every trade. The scheme was named LABC Building Excellence Awards 2025 Regional Winner and National Finalist Best Residential Extension, judged by building control officers who see the parts of a project that never make it into a photograph.
The house, in detail.
Extending, rebuilding, or both?
If you are extending and rebuilding at the same time and want one contractor holding structure, envelope, services and finishes on a single programme, our surveyors are the right place to start.