Fountain House — a Mayfair apartment stripped back and rebuilt to a premium standard

The brief

A London property investor commissioned a full refurbishment of a Mayfair apartment in Fountain House, designed by Reza Parizi of Price Parizi. The brief was to improve the layout inside the building’s fixed structure and bring the flat to a premium standard fit for the address.

The property and the constraints

A two-bedroom apartment on the fifth floor of Fountain House, a mansion block in Mayfair. The flat needed to come back to its shell, but the columns and load-bearing walls were fixed and had to stay. The access was the defining reality: the only route in was a narrow service staircase, with no goods lift, so everything reached the flat by hand. A secondary means of escape had to stay workable throughout, there was no skip space on the street, and the finish standard for an address like this is set high before the first wall comes down.

The build

Full internal strip-out: kitchen and appliances, two bathrooms, all floor and ceiling finishes with their insulation, and the complete plumbing and electrical systems. Removal of non-structural internal walls, with columns and load-bearing walls retained. New layout to the architect’s drawings. A new suspended floor throughout to carry the re-routed services. Two bathrooms rebuilt with full waterproof tanking to walls and floors. New kitchen. Full rewire and re-plumb. Premium decorative finish throughout.

Challenges and how we resolved them

The reconfiguration had to work inside a structure that could not change, so the new plan was set out around the retained columns and load-bearing walls rather than against them. Bathrooms in a mansion flat are the real risk: a leak into the flat below is the expensive failure, so both bathrooms were fully tanked across walls and floors before tiling, not just at the tray. Moving the services to suit the new layout meant laying a new suspended floor throughout, which let the pipework and cabling run where the design needed rather than where the old structure allowed. Access was the hardest constraint of all. Five floors up, a narrow service staircase, no goods lift and no skip space meant every board in and every bag of waste out moved by hand on a tight schedule. The programme was as much a logistics plan as a build sequence.

Approach

We built to the architect’s tender drawings and coordinated with Reza Parizi on the proposed layout, finishes and services. Strip back to sound structure first. Mechanical and electrical first-fix, then tanking and waterproofing checked before any finishes, then a finishing sequence held to a Mayfair tolerance.

The result

A Mayfair apartment taken back to its structure and rebuilt as a premium home: reconfigured layout, two new tanked bathrooms, new kitchen, new services throughout, and a finish that matches the address. Delivered inside a fixed structural envelope and a working building.