Ruining traditional houses should be illegal?

[Scottishshopaholic]

A relative has recently purchased an older house, its Victorian or Edwardian. They have been renovating it and have ripped everything out without restoring any original features or being sympathetic to the original features. Think all original cornicing removed and not replaced, original doors, skirtings and architraves replaced with ultra modern equivalents. Grey LVT flooring laid (I suppose a future owner should be able to rip these up and restore the original floor boards). Think they have also done away with the fireplace. Surely if you want a modern looking house they should have bought a modern style house?

The white, grey and black colour scheme isn’t to my taste, but surely they could have still used those colours but kept original features. It seems like a crime that those original features were over 100 years old but are now gone forever.

It’s their house, they can do what they want. It’s not like you have to live there.

This drives me nuts. Leave people alone to do what they want to do. It’s their house.

Someone on our towns Facebook page has just started a pile-on on some poor property owner who had the audacity to put slabs down in his own front garden. Who do these people actually think they are?!

I hate the ultra modern electric fire with a massive TV attached to the wall on the chimney breast above that takes the place of a proper fire place. The shiny grey kitchens too that are so out of keeping with the property. I’m with you OP but once it belongs to someone they can do what they want with it.

Fireplaces have no business whatsoever in town centres in our day and age. They are massive polluters and not energy efficient. Unless the house is listed, my view is that chimney breasts should be removed. It does add quite a lot of space to a room, and makes furniture placement a lot easier. You absolutely don’t need a fireplace to add design interest to a room.

Whenever I see a living room with a fireplace, I think the owners are climate change deniers and self-indulgent snobs.

I voted YANBU, but I do not actually think it should be illegal. We have ways to protect important period homes but we can't control everything, it would do more harm than good.

I do judge people like this inside my head.

It's common enough however, especially with more recent older homes. I remember when everyone was ripping out good quality mid-century stuff, in good condition, and almost everyone agreed it was awful. This was just before it came back into style. And the same thing happened to a lot of Victorian places in the mid 20th century.

yanbu. Home decoration to cut your wrists by !!

In two years time there will be a roaring trade for builders in ripping out dreary grey panelling & flooring, and restoring houses to something like normality.

I'm looking for a new home and am happy to say the houses that haven't had a depressing accident in a paint factory (ie not uniform grey) are about £200,000 less expensive.

There are still plenty around that haven't been ruined. Just keep looking OP.

We have a fireplace we don't use. It'd cost a fortune to remove the chimney. There's no correlation between my fireplace and opinions on climate change

Houses are for living in, not looking at.

I love this kind of nonsense.

So based on that houses should all be square, utilitarian boxes, and decorated in the cheapest, most neutral way possible.

I live on a 1930s estate. In so many houses the beautiful original stained glass in the windows and front door has been ripped out and replaced with plain glass or worse, leaded lights. Such a shame, we preserved the original stained glass when we replaced our windows.

We don’t use our fireplaces but they do give focus to a room. I always feel that there is something missing in a living room without a fireplace. And I think the alcoves on either side are rather elegant.

My friend wanted to renovate the listed house she grew up in. It’s not that special and I was very surprised it was listed. The kitchen was tiny for a four bed house, and she wanted to add a granny flat extension for her mother that would not have affected the original building other than a hallway that would attach the buildings. She was refused permission. So her family home is awkwardly laid out and not really fit for modern living. At least they allowed her to replace the kitchen so she can have a dishwasher!
I also own a listed house. It is a small cottage of no particular merit on its own but as one of ten together they form a listed terrace. Everyone has removed the old coal range in the kitchen when remodelling. They did not get permission to do this. I want to remodel the old 80s kitchen which is falling apart. I can do that, but I can’t get rid of the stove. While I recognise it is an original feature, it is not a neutral feature like coving or a even a fireplace, it actually makes it very hard to update the kitchen for modern use.
while I agree listed buildings should need permission if changes are to be made, but with a more pragmatic view. It seems bizarre to insist this one feature be kept when the house has been changed so much the original occupants would not recognise it, and the feature is hardly rare. And the ‘experts’ are not infallible. A friend, when meeting with the listed building inspector about removing a wall between her kitchen and dining room, was told that an opening could be made but they must take care not to damage the paneling and coving. The panelling that was added in the 1980s (long after the building was listed) and the coving was from B&Q!

And I want to live somewhere that - imo - looks beautiful, not a characterless box the same as everyone else's!

Original features all the way for me - we've owned lots of old houses (the oldest was Tudor) and we've never felt inclined to remove anything that lends period charm. However much those chimney breasts/fireplaces, for example, might impede 'modern' living, their beauty outweighs any inconvenience, imo.

Sadly, our current grade 2 listed cottage (Georgian) was butchered in the mid 1960s and by the time we bought it in 2024 had no original - doors (except the front door), staircase, skirting, architrave, fireplaces, ceilings, floorboards (apart from one room) or even plaster remaining. Every internal wall but one is a new stud wall too. It even has an integral garage where there used to be reception rooms 😢 At least the timber windows they put in resemble - kind of - what would have been there.

We're gradually (with permission, obvs) attempting to sympathetically restore it and give it some dignity/character back, but I'd cheerfully strangle the idiots who ripped everything out and thought a crazy paved fireplace was an appropriate replacement!

Flood risk as well as unattractive.

I do somewhat agree. Modern refurbs can nicely compliment traditional features.

we live in a Victorian (ish) house. When we were viewing the owner referred to the patterned Minton tiles in the hallway. As soon as I got excited at the mention she cut it down saying they didn’t like them and ‘ripped them out and covered the area with carpet’ 🤦🏻‍♀️🤦🏻‍♀️🤦🏻‍♀️ Sure enough I was picturing lovely Minton tiles staring down at a dingy burgundy carpet.

I really dislike all the Victorian houses who knock out the back rooms and have a massive kitchen / diner with bi folds. Yuk. They all look the same and are totally not in keeping either the style of house. So many of them on Rightmove. We have an Edwardian terrace which still has a hodgepodge of smaller rooms and I absolutely love it.

It’s quite funny that people moan about not wanting a house that looks the same as everyone else’s or they “all look the same” completely ignoring the fact that Victorian’s were the original copy paste & repeat house builder, building rows upon rows of identical houses.

Also my estate agent told me that if people have dogs, they often leave a residual dog poo smell which is grim.

I’m with you, OP! I bought a very old house a couple of months ago which has basically had every single original feature ripped out. I’m now in the process of lots of research and professional advice to restore it. I just can’t get my head around some of the things the previous owner did. Their choice though, I guess!

I don’t disagree with your principles though in practice it’s not possible. I honestly thought people had stopped taking out period features. We’ve tried to keep as much of out period house as possible but in replacing the single glazed windows we’ll be losing some coloured, not stained, glass. We are replacing with wood windows as that’s the only way of keeping the other period features round the windows.

Eurgh! We visited an outlying area of London recently where on one residential road of 1930s houses hardly any still had any bare earth showing in their front gardens. Most were covered in asphalt. I hadn't thought about astroturf in the back gardens. It's so short-sighted given the weird changes going on in our weather and the very poor state of the sewage system.

We have a fireplace in every room but we don’t use them and have a heat pump and solar panels, electric cars and don’t fly. 🤷🏻‍♀️ There is no correlation between wanting to preserve some of the history of a property and being a climate change denier.

Well, if houses are listed or in conservation areas, or has article 4 directions, ‘ruining’ them is illegal depending on the level of protection.

I’d like to see the use of plastic grass or topiary made illegal, but there we are.

I live in an old Victorian farmhouse (husband is a farmer so no high income). It is expensive to keep warm, and a money pit. I can understand wanting to rip it all out and make it easier to keep warm and clean. I've not done so, but get the temptation. Also restoring a house and keeping original features IME costs more than ripping out.

I think if people want to make their homes easier to maintain (PVC windows), warmer (LVT flooring), let them if it isn't listed. Building methods change (lime mortar for example is costlier than standard) as do fashions. It's only bricks and mortar at end of day, it's people that matter.

There was a lovely , unique , 1900 house which I used admire when walking our dog a few years ago now. It came up for sale , in fact we put in an offer on it as it had real character. We didn’t get it unfortunately.
The new owners then built a horrible garage and a ridiculously awful fence completely out of character to the original historic home, I had to stop walking our dog passed it as it upset me to see what their vandalism had done to a beautiful house. They could have added railings to the original wall, that would have looked in keeping , and put the garage to the side where there was space, I think they pay so much for the house they did everything else on the cheap. The neighbors in the area were angry & disgusted by the vandalism, but the so called council planning didn’t give a shit. Very sad to see so I totally agree with you OP