‘I paid £3m for a home on my dream street – then demolished it’

Back in the early 2000s, Ziomek Wiertelak found himself working on a house in Highgate, north London. Young and ambitious, Ziomek was building up his own construction company and was deeply taken with the wide tree-lined street by Hampstead Heath.

“I brought my family to see the house I was doing, and I said to them: ‘One day, we will live here’,” he said.

True to his word, in 2013, Ziomek paid almost £3m for a house on his dream street. And then he razed it to the ground.

Buying a house just to knock it down sounds like a counterintuitive move, like buying a car and then deliberately crashing it.

But Ziomek, 51, was aware that well-located building sites are hard, if not impossible, to come by. If he wanted his dream home on his ideal street, it was his only option. 

“I know that if you refurbish a house, you have got limitations. If you want to do it your way it has to be a new build,” he said.

There are also significant planning advantages to buying land with an existing building on it.

The 1970s-built house that Ziomek bought was small, and badly designed. “It was built by somebody very cheaply using the cheapest materials you could buy,” he said.

If Ziomek had been able to find an empty plot it would, he admits, have been preferable because he would have been spared the expense of a demolition. “But there are no empty plots like this in prime London,” he said.

And while he took a gamble by investing a seven-figure sum on a house he didn’t want, without planning permission to replace it, experience told him that the local planners would be amenable to getting rid of the old house if he could offer them something better. 

“It was a very awful house,” he said.

Once the house had been reduced to a pile of rubble, Ziomek was left with a blank canvas, measuring around 200ft by 100ft.

With planning permission in place, he set to work on a three-year project to replace the old house with a 6,680 sq ft double-fronted home. The multi-award winning modern property, built in a mix of brick, glass and concrete, was designed by architects Cousins & Cousins.

Ziomek, his wife and their two daughters moved in in 2017. “I love the house, I love north London, I am happy,” he said.

Not all teardown projects are deliberate strategies. When Mark Roberts bought his house on the other side of London in 2009, his plan was to live in it.

Admittedly the modernist 1950s house in Sydenham, southeast London, had seen better days, so Mark knew he was going to have to do some work on the £310,000 property.

“We went a long way down the road of saving the house, but as we got more and more radical about what we wanted to remove the structural engineer said: ‘Just knock it down and start again’,” said Mark. “We realised it would be cheaper to do it that way.”

Back in 2009, Mark, an engineer, was living in Milan with his wife – the couple now also have a daughter, 13.

Their block-built detached house had some serious shortcomings. “The windows were not great, and the insulation was not great, but it had been built by an architect to live in and I did like it,” said Mark, 56.

With a blank canvas to work on, architects Paul Archer Design created a pared-down geometric, open-plan family home.

The old house measured a compact 1,220 sq ft. The new home measures just over 1,800 sq ft, and cost around £217 per sq ft to build. In 2016, the family was able to move in, after a year-long build.

Looking back, Mark has no regrets about his pivot from saving the house to demolishing it. “I would not have found an empty site like this, with a garden and neighbours on either side,” he said. “And it is a strange quirk of London that land is much more valuable than the house built on it.”

Beyond London, Emma Goddard had long dreamed of building a modern home on her family farm near Downton in Wiltshire. But since the area is located between Cranborne Chase and the New Forest – both classed as an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty – she knew that getting planning permission was going to be tricky.

Emma, 46, and her husband, Tariq, 48, decided their best hope was to replace an existing house on the farm – a cold, damp, and dismal-looking pebbledash 1940s bungalow originally built for farm workers – with their dream family home.

“I don’t think we would have got permission to do it any other way,” said Emma, who helps manage the farm and also works as a sustainability manager.

The couple hired Western Design Architects to draw up plans for the house and steer them through the planning system.

Happily, planners tend to be willing to allow replacement buildings so long as they are a similar shape and size as the original, and the bungalow’s extravagantly pitched roof was on the couple’s side. 

Their steel-framed, timber-clad two-storey house is actually slightly lower than the bungalow. And they were given some latitude to diverge from the original footprint. “The new house is slightly longer, but not as wide,” said Emma.

The 2,239 sq ft house took nine months to build, at a cost of £500,000. Emma, Tariq, an author and publisher, and their sons Titus, nine, and Spike, 11, moved in in 2019.

As an environmentalist Emma did have some concerns about tearing down – rather than restoring – an existing house, but concluded there was little about the bungalow worth saving.

And, since it is powered with solar panels and a heat pump, she is comforted by the knowledge that the sustainability credentials of her new house are strong.