Our clients bought this beautiful site on the edge of the Thames floodplain in 2017 and asked us to design a house to replace a 1960s bungalow. The new house has a floor area that is 62% greater than the bungalow. The main difficulty at the planning application stage was negotiating the height of the building. While the planners were keen to keep the ridge height low, the Environment Agency wanted the ground floor level as high as possible due to the possibility of flooding in the future. The resulting house is designed with one and a half storeys and has flood-proof tanking and automatic flood-resistant doors.