Private flats

What a mansion-flat interior brief covers

Mansion-flat interiors is the brief for rooms behind one flat door. It deals with walls, ceilings and the painted timber you choose to include: doors, skirtings, architraves, shutters and cupboard fronts. It also deals with the floors and furniture that stay, because parquet, stone or a fitted carpet in a Victoria flat often remains while the decorating is done. The work can run through a long corridor and several rooms that are seen together when the doors are open. It can be arranged around a household that keeps one bedroom in use, or around a keyholder who opens a pied-à-terre and locks up again. Preparation belongs in that brief. Plaster cracks where a cornice meets the ceiling, filler opening along a skirting, and handled door edges all need a decision before a finish is described as complete. The page stops at the private rooms. It does not specify the common stair, the lift lobby or a neighbour’s entrance. It does not, by itself, cover sash windows on the street elevation or a front door at pavement level. Those are separate instructions, even when the same address is involved. If the building is listed, changes that affect special interest inside the flat need advice in their own right. Refreshing sound paint is a different conversation from altering historic joinery.

Sources: Westminster: listed-building consent; Westminster Cathedral conservation area audit

What a tenancy-change repaint covers

Rental flats and tenancy changes is the brief for an empty, or nearly empty, flat in the interval between occupiers. The useful starting point is the checkout or the room list, not a scheme for a household that is staying. Marks, scuffs and repairs that furniture had hidden become visible, and each one needs a line: decorate, repair first, or leave. The people in the instruction are usually an owner and a letting agent, sometimes a keyholder who is neither. Cleaning, inventory, photographs and viewings come after the coats, and they need a gap the product can support rather than a date chosen in advance. The page is about making the approved rooms ready for that sequence, and about recording colour references so the next instruction is not a patchwork of near-matches. It is not a design scheme for someone living in the flat. It is not the common parts, even when the letting includes a share of the stair. It is not an undertaking that a move-in date can be met before preparation and recoats have been allowed for. If the flat is still furnished and occupied under the tenancy, this is the wrong page. That situation belongs with mansion-flat interiors, because the constraint is living in the rooms, not handing them on.

Where the occupied brief ends and the handover brief begins

The same mansion flat can need either service, which is why the boundary has to be stated in the enquiry. Use mansion-flat interiors when the people who live there, or who return to a pied-à-terre, are the ones the finish must suit, and when belongings, a sleeping room or a keyholder’s lock-up shape the order of work. Use the tenancy-change page when the flat is being passed from one occupier to the next and the following appointments are cleaning, inventory or a viewing. A pied-à-terre can look like a rental because both may be empty on the day of a visit. The difference is purpose. One returns the rooms to the same household. The other prepares them for someone else, on an agent’s or owner’s handover list. A rented flat that stays occupied during the work is still an occupied-home brief. There is no checkout gap to plan around. Say which of those is true in the first message. If you want a fuller scheme now and a lighter repaint at a later let, instruct the one that is happening, and keep the later one as a note rather than as a mixed scope. Private rooms and the shared stair are a further boundary. Decorating a landing outside the flat door is a communal instruction, even if you also own the flat.

What to send for each private-flat enquiry

For a mansion-flat interior, send the room list, photographs of plaster and joinery, and a note of what must stay: parquet, stone, carpet and fitted cupboards. Say who will be in the flat, who holds keys if you will not, and which path to the kitchen or bathroom has to remain walkable. If the block requires contractor details, add the manager’s rules on the lift and on deliveries. Around Ashley Gardens the private rooms sit behind mosaic porches and stone-banded red brick. On Carlisle Place and Morpeth Terrace the building may be an earlier yellow-brick or stucco house rather than a large managed block. Beside Vincent Square, blocks such as Vincent Square Mansions and St Augustine’s Mansions still separate the flat from the shared stair. For a tenancy change, send the checkout or a room schedule, who holds the keys, and the later appointments you hope to protect, without treating them as an agreed finish date. Name repairs that must happen before paint, and any colour references the agent already uses. In both cases, say whether any window on the street or any entrance door is included. If it is, the exterior page is the other half of the enquiry. Photographs of one room are a start. The quotation needs the full list of surfaces in and surfaces out.

Sources: Westminster Cathedral conservation area audit; Vincent Square conservation area audit; Grosvenor Gardens conservation area audit