Proposal Made to Increase Height of Park Road Flats

Grandfield Court latest block to be considered for extra storey

A visualisation of the block with the planned extra floor. Picture: Stefan Shaw Studio

July 14, 2026

A single-storey rooftop extension proposed for Grandfield Court, a three-storey post-war apartment block at the junction of Park Road and the Great West Road is the latest building in the area to be considered for an upward extension.

The scheme (P/2026/1969), put forward by Stefan Shaw Studio on behalf of Vera Road Limited, would add a new floor to the existing building, delivering five self-contained flats — two one-bedroom units, one two-bedroom unit and two larger two-bedroom, three-person units.

Grandfield Court was built in the 1970s as a straightforward, brick-clad block with a flat roof and repetitive window bays sitting within the Chiswick House Conservation Area.

The architect says that the design approach is deliberately restrained. The new storey is set flush with the existing parapet, clad in light-toned standing seam metal rather than brick, with window openings aligned vertically to the fenestration below. The accompanying heritage statement leans on the idea that the extension is "honest" rather than pastiche — a visually distinct, recessive top layer that doesn't pretend to be part of the original building, but which defers to it in scale and positioning. The reasoning draws on well-established conservation planning principles: additions to buildings within conservation areas are expected to be legible as new work, while remaining subordinate to the host structure and avoiding harm to the wider historic setting.

Grandfield Court is part of a wider pattern of upward extension in Chiswick and the surrounding parts of west London, driven by a mix of national planning policy changes and commercial logic: adding a storey to an existing block is often cheaper and faster than a ground-up redevelopment, makes use of land and infrastructure that already exists, and — for freeholders — can be a highly profitable way to monetise "air rights" above a building.

Since 2020, national planning rules (introduced via amendments to the Town and Country Planning General Permitted Development Order) have allowed the owners of many free-standing, purpose-built blocks of flats built between 1948 and 2018 to add up to two additional storeys without a full planning application, using a lighter-touch "prior approval" process instead. This right has been a major driver of small-scale rooftop schemes across outer London. Because the site is both within a conservation area, this application requires full planning permission rather than the fast-track "permitted development" process available elsewhere.

Grandfield Court as it is now. Picture: Stefan Shaw Studio

The Chiswick area has seen a steady flow of comparable proposals in recent years — from small blocks seeking prior approval for one or two additional flats above existing flat-roofed buildings, to larger redevelopment schemes such as the one taking place at Chiswick Village.

Stefan Shaw Studio and Vera Road Limited — the same architect and developer behind Grandfield Court — have also submitted a closely comparable proposal (ref. P/2026/1694) for Oxbridge Court, a three-storey 1970s block a short distance away. The report also cites a prior approved rooftop addition at nearby Gillian Court on Cambridge Road North as a local precedent the applicants are relying on. Taken together with Grandfield Court, it suggests this firm and developer are pursuing something close to a repeatable model for adding a storey to Chiswick's stock of flat-roofed, mid-century apartment blocks — pairing the same cladding language, unit mix and "honest addition" heritage argument across multiple sites in fairly short order.

Another application was submitted last month to add to storeys to the block at Claremont Grove near Dukes Meadows although Stefan Shaw Studio doesn't appear to be involved in this scheme.

The Grandfield Court heritage statement makes the case that the existing building is, at most, a neutral contributor to the conservation area — a later twentieth-century block that doesn't share the architectural language of the Victorian and Edwardian streets that give the Chiswick House Conservation Area its principal significance.

If approved, Grandfield Court would add five homes to Park Road without extending the building's footprint, altering its entrances, or requiring demolition — arguably a low-impact way of delivering housing at a moment when London boroughs are under sustained pressure to increase supply on constrained urban sites.