Handmade kitchens in Fulham, SW6

Fulham is built almost entirely from one house type, repeated thousands of times: the late Victorian terrace, narrow at the front and long at the back, with a side return alongside the rear room that was originally an outdoor passage and is now, in a large proportion of cases, a glazed extension.

That extension is where the kitchen goes, and it is a genuinely awkward space to fit conventionally. The junction between the original rear wall and the new structure almost never produces a clean rectangle. There is usually a returning wall, a soil stack that could not be moved, a steel corner that needs boxing, and a rooflight upstand overhead. Standard cabinets meet these conditions with filler panels; made-to-measure cabinets simply follow the geometry.

The unextended houses have the opposite problem — a small rear kitchen, often two metres wide, where reduced-depth runs and ceiling-height cabinetry are the only sensible answer.

Access in Fulham is workable but needs planning: most of the borough is in a controlled parking zone, the streets around Parsons Green and Munster Village are tight, and a fair number of properties are flat conversions with a shared entrance hall. Permits and access routes are sorted at survey stage.