Fire door needed or not into lounge with a loft conversion?

[fishfortea]

I have recently moved into a property that has a loft conversion, all bedroom doors are fire doors as is the lounge. I would like to remove the lounge door,the wall that separates the lounge and the stairs so it is all open planned. It would really open up downstairs but obviously do not want to do anything that would be against building regs!

Nobody from the building control police will smash your door down and drag you away.

However there is a slight risk that members of your family will be overcome by smoke in the event of a fire, which might rise up the stairwell very quickly and block the escape of anyone still alive. It is quite rare.

Preventing which is the purpose of the doors.

Regs seem to be more about mains smoke and heat detectors now, so may well be in line with current regs anyway, if you install them. I'd ask at local council.

I'm pretty sure you have to have a fire resistant door for the lounge too. We have an open plan ground floor and now that we've had plans done to do further work, we have been told it's against building regs (the guy doing our plans is an ex building inspector). Now that we're needing planning permission for other works we are getting around it by installing Crittall doors/windows to close the opening but still have an open plan feel! The only other option I believe is to have a sprinkler system, but for us we'd still need a door at the beginning of the first floor which would look awful.

With a loft conversion, you need a protected corridor down the stairs, which is the issue with the open plan downstairs. So imo getting rid of the stair wall would be a problem. As pigletjohn says, the building reg people won't bang your door down and take you away, but if the wall is structural you will need building regs approval to remove it, which they may not grant you if it makes the attic non-compliant as a result.

I used to have a link to a BBC news report on a house with loft rooms where the family had been wiped out in minutes.

If smoke and flame get into the stairway and there are no fire doors there is little time and little chance of escape. I find it very upsetting. Also when I hear people say they took the fires doors out because they weren't pretty enough.

Piglet what do you think about the new regs allowing mains-linked smoke alarms in every room instead? This was the route we took but I'm nervous! Unless one fits self-closers to the fire doors, which in most homes is a non-starter for all sorts of reasons, they are fairly useless anyway I guess.

The closest we've ever come to a fire was an (old-style) light-bulb in the cupboard under the (wooden, victorian) stairs melting a roll of gaffer tape. It still gives me the shivers thinking about it.