Ensuites instead of family bathroom?

[Dreambow]

We have recently bought a new home in SE London! It was a HMO (around 4000 sq ft) so needs a lot of work to get it back into a family home. We could make it into 5 five bedrooms with 4 ensuites and 1 family bathroom or alternatively 6 bedrooms with 6 ensuites (with one bath in the principal bedroom). What would you choose? Would it be hard to resell in the future without a family bathroom? Thank you!

Thank you so much for all your comments and thoughts! Super helpful! Definitely think we will have a family bathroom now and less ensuites! Would love to have a nanny room in the basement as @minipie suggested - will ask the architect about that. @minipie what is the VAT exemption? - I am not aware of it. Many thanks :)

If you are converting a building from flats into a house then you are exempt from VAT on materials and, I think, builders costs too. So 20% saving which on a big London refurb is pretty massive savings.
It can be quite tricky to get the exemption in practice, I believe you would need to order everything through your builder which means being pretty organised and having a cooperative builder ( you might need to pay the builder a bit extra for the extra time involved in all the ordering). If you look on Houzz for forum posts by someone called Resh, he did a big S London project and used this VAT exemption, some of his posts explain how it worked.

Sorry it’s not zero VAT it’s 5% VAT rather than 20%.

Here is the relevant gov.uk page www.gov.uk/guidance/buildings-and-construction-vat-notice-708#section7

Would there be a downstairs guest loo for visitors?

Did a similar project once and here are my thoughts:

Master bedroom should have en-suite and dressing room
At least one full family bathroom (bath, shower) that doesn’t need to be accessed through a bedroom
Downstairs loo for guests is nice if you have space
Nanny suite or guest room should have an en-suite
Other bedrooms/kids rooms fine to have one bathroom per two rooms. Less cleaning. Personally I wouldn’t make en-suite as I think that limits your floor plan, what if you want to make one of the rooms into an office, change the uses when the kids grow up etc.

So would probably end up at 4 bathrooms plus toilet, 2-3 en-suite.

Better to have fewer bathrooms but keep proportions more generous IMO.

with that floorplan, I'd put a bathroom block as marked in red, that is, a set of bathrooms / loos all one above the other. that makes the plumbing & pipework much easier and so keeps your budget down.

so in the basement, there is a loo (+ utility if you want). On the ground floor, there is a visitors loo, on the 1st floor there is an ensuite to bed 2 (marked ES) and a family bath (marked F). Bed 2 could become the dressing room to bed 1 with a v generous ensuite if you want. And on the 2nd floor, there is a family bathroom (marked F)