A suite in the house: hot, cold, rest, repeat

One drainage line, one plant panel, three steps

A suite is a sauna, a wet room and a plunge arranged so a person moves between them without dressing, crossing a corridor or going outside in winter. Get that right and the room becomes a habit; get it wrong and it becomes an expensive cupboard.

Technically it means one drainage line with real falls, one ducted extract route, one cable run and one plant position behind a single access panel. Those four things belong in the build drawing. Everything after them is finishes.

Converted rooms, and what they cost to convert

Most of what we build is a conversion: a garage, an outbuilding, a lower floor, a courtyard room, a rear store in a Creole townhouse, a wing of a riad. The building already has walls and often drainage, which is why a conversion usually beats an extension on both cost and programme.

The two things that decide whether a room can take it are the drain — can it be given a fall to an existing line — and the extract, which has to reach outside. If both are possible the rest is ordinary work.

Older houses and modest boards

A good number of the best houses in our markets have electrical installations that predate anything we would hang a 9 kW heater on, extended twice since. We survey the board before promising a heater size, and sometimes the honest answer is a smaller, better-insulated cabin rather than an expensive rewire.

Where a house runs on an inverter and a generator, the suite is designed into that system rather than onto it: a scheduled heater circuit, the chiller interlocked against it, everything verified onto the board the changeover feeds.

Tenancies and demountable specifications

Where the occupant is a company, an embassy or a tenant rather than an owner — which in Gigiri, Asokoro, Muthaiga and Masaki is frequently the case — we build a demountable specification: bolted frame, a single service connection point, nothing chased into the structure, and handover documentation a facilities team can actually use.

In short

• Hot, cold and rest within three steps of each other
• One drainage line, one extract route, one plant panel in the drawing
• Board and inverter surveyed before a heater size is promised
• Demountable specification and full documentation on leased property