Maidenhead Architects
About us
The housing stock around Berkshire is some of the most charming in southeast England, and still it is always evolving and improving. Buying in a town like Maidenhead gets you to that happy medium between village life and suburbia. The ingredients for a quiet life are all here: detached Victorians and mock Tudors with deep gardens and established hedges, moments from rolling green hills dotted with sheep. And yet the centre gets a decent amount of buzz on the weekends.
This mini-city by the Thames enjoys a wealth of heritage and mid-century housing with potential for expansion and renovation – as well as land on which to build anew. Larger heritage properties are found in the north part of town, toward the river, edging up into the village of Cookham. The streets weaving in and out of the Cut are pretty too, with cottages coated in vines hidden within the old-growth forest. Skilled Maidenhead architects can help you transform a property or respectfully plot a modern structure within the landscape.
Projects
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Maidenhead Architects
Maidenhead Architects
Maidenhead Architects
Your Maidenhead project
We founded Scenario with a collaborative approach to functional, contemporary residential architecture. Our work illustrates a keen understanding of the way homeowners live today. Take a look at our landmark project Scenario House, a Victorian conversion with soaring ceilings, practical features and robust, modern materials shortlisted for the RIBA London Awards. If you’re looking for a Maidenhead architect with a profound knowledge of the region and an open mind, please contact us and share your thoughts.
Tip
Discover if your chosen architect has had success steering planning applications through your local council. Visit the “planning applications” section of your council’s website and enter the architect’s name in the search criteria.
Scenario is an established architecture practice focusing on contemporary residential design. We take on projects of every scale and scope, from home refurbishment, renovation and expansions to new-builds.
Working with Scenario Architecture
Scenario is a RIBA Chartered Practice, complying with RIBA’s strict health and safety criteria.
We tackle domestic architecture of all scopes and scales, from new-builds to home renovations and expansions. Our studio provides a bespoke service: we collaborate closely with our clients from the drafting phase through construction, aiming to complete all our projects on time and on budget. If you’re searching for a Maidenhead architect, search our online portfolio for a project that represents your vision.
Our use of 3D design technology saves our clients time and money. This Chartered Institute of Building case study uses a Scenario project to illustrate the benefits of advanced technology in residential architecture.
Maidenhead Architects
In our client's words
Maidenhead Architects
Great ideas and vision to help with our substantial improvement of a Victorian terrace. In our experience Scenario's method prioritises the final result. That may mean more professional fees or higher quotes from contractors, as they understand the exact requirements.
Maidenhead Architects
Great, professional service. Good drawings and models and ultimately passed planning at the first attempt with Hackney Council. Would certainly recommend!
Maidenhead Architects
Scenario Architecture have created an outstanding design and space that was beyond my expectations. The design was through their unique process of understanding the client’s daily scenarios and collaborating with the client to come up with a unique design. The design process is one of the most memorable parts of the process and they also stretched my existing ideas to help create this unique space. A stress free journey throughout the whole process which Scenario were indispensable by giving advice on many difficult design and build decisions.
Maidenhead Architects
We wanted to renovate our house in a conservation area in central London. Given this involved a complete demolition and new build with an extra floor on top, getting planning approval was always going to be tricky. Scenario did an amazing job on the new house 'envelope' and throughout the planning phase. We couldn't have wished for better from them and having succeeded in gaining planning approval owe them a very big 'thank you'.
Maidenhead Architects
Scenario were great at thinking imaginatively and coming up with a design for a ground floor extension that was more ambitous than other architects we spoke to. They also helped us find a contractor who was able to complete the project working within timescale and our tight budget. I would recommend for mid to large sized projects with sufficient budget to allow for full utilisation of their creativity.
Further Reading
Maidenhead is a modern town with a small village feel, made up of quiet cul-de-sacs with ample brick houses and postwar semis clustered around festive pubs and outstanding schools. It serves as the practical, liveable, amenity-rich centre between Windsor and weekend idylls like Cliveden House, the manor-house resort and spa.
You’ll find all sorts here, from lovers of mid-century developments, with their mod cons and garden conservatories, to Grand Designs devotees, who clear the way for giant estates that could sleep 20. In between are families who want more space than they could find in London, at a reasonable price with room for improvement. Most people open up existing houses with an open-plan kitchen lined with Crittall, a great room, nanny suite, children’s wing or a summerhouse. These people adore the bucolic setting and the weekend vibe yet yearn for extra space to spread out or entertain.
Out here, you’ll likely be able to find an affordable house that doesn’t require complicated strategies to achieve planning permission when you want to alter it. Maidenhead architects who have experience dealing with the local authorities and grounding in period architecture can transform a house with a past into a house with a long and happy future. There are few technical problems a skilled architect can’t solve with creative thinking and a good contractor, so it makes sense to think big. The good-sized gardens have real potential too.
A wonderful world of green exists beyond the private gardens. There’s a reason the Queen lives in the so-called Royal Borough of Berkshire, just a few minutes downriver. Her rambling weekend pad – built in the 11th century for William the Conqueror no less – oversees and overlooks some of the prettiest green vistas among England’s affluent Southeast. From the Thames River valley, along its long lateral border, to the North Wessex Downs, monopolising the west, Berkshire is long on natural beauty.
The county boasts architectural splendour in spades, too. Windsor Castle, itself a hodgepodge of styles introduced over centuries, has informed the surrounding areas for all of its existence. Eton College, just across the river, came along in the 15th century to educate the country’s elite and spawned an entire village of handsome residential streets. The Palladian sprawl of the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, near the Hampshire border, followed three centuries later and taught Princes William and Harry. The Ascot Racecourse was founded in 1711, putting its quiet town of red-brick Gothic churches and modest stone cottages on the map. Once you’ve cleared Highclere, Berkshire turns up big skies, family farms, village greens with ancient stone churches and fields of bouncy alpaca.
Frequently Asked Questions
- As a dynamic practice operating in London’s premium residential market, managing projects remotely and conducting virtual meetings was a very familiar territory for us, long before the pandemic began and ‘working remotely’ became the norm.
- Our clients have very busy lifestyles and may move between several different locations, both within the UK and beyond, during the lifecycle of a typical project.
- To accommodate such client needs and enable us to run their projects smoothly we had all the technology and know-how associated with remote working in place for several years.
- Read our full (Virtual) Process
- Scenario based design – We start each and every project with a meticulous analysis of our client’s vision, requirements and aspirations. We do this by asking our clients to imagine their everyday scenarios living in the completed house and describe their desired interaction with it.
- Uniquely interactive - Our client’s deep involvement in the process does not stop with completion of the brief. Our design meetings are highly interactive, informal and fun.
- Designed to reflect you – Based purely on your lifestyle, aspirations and requirements and free from externally imposed concepts, metaphors and pre-conceptions, a completely fresh and unique design will gradually emerge and it will tell your story not ours.
- Collaborative – We start the conversation with planners early and advise most of our clients to seek pre-planning advice prior to submission of a full planning application. Our experience shows that when properly consulted and liaised with, most planning case officers will be receptive to conduct a professional dialogue, increasing chances of successes.
- Strategic – We tailor a custom planning strategy for each project based on its circumstances such as planning history, local context and specific challenging elements. We sometimes split applications or introduce minor tweaks to the scheme during the consideration period in conversation with the officers to prevent one contentious element from jeopardising approval of the main scheme.
- Professional – Our experience shows that the quality and clarity of the submission in terms of background research, planning history of the property and context, precedent and of course the arguments presented to support the case has a tremendous effect on success rate.
- The decision period clock only starts ticking once the application is validated by the Council, This requires then to check that the forms are completed correctly and that the submission contains all the necessary drawings, statements and reports.
- Although required by law to provide a decision within the statutory eight weeks period, it is not uncommon for councils to miss the deadline of the consideration period, normally only by a few days, sometimes longer.
- In some cases the council may ask us as your agent for an extension of time, this may be requested due to internal reasons or as an acceptable result of a professional discussion that we are conducting with them about certain aspects of the application that they are not sure about.
- Our experience shows that planning officers respond better to projects when they feel consulted and collaborated with. We find that when we truly listen to their often helpful and valid feedback and treat them as consultants for the projects and not representative of an evil enforcing authority, they tend to collaborate well with us and demonstrate increased flexibility.
- Although the council in theory have eight weeks to consider your application, in practice they are constantly overloaded. They will only look at your application in the last few days of the consideration period. If this is the first time that they come across a scheme that they were never consulted about, our chance to secure permission for you in a single attempt is significantly compromised.
- The standard practice is for the council to consider the full planning application as submitted and then issue a yes or no decision. Case officers are not required or even encouraged to enter a discussion with us or accept resubmission of minor changes to the proposed scheme during the consideration period.