Many Felpham kitchens are in houses built between the wars
Ask where the kitchens in Felpham are and the honest answer is: in houses older than most people assume. The Summerley Estate was laid out from about 1922 and runs to roughly 344 houses, most of them from the twenties and thirties. The Felpham Beach Estate, south of Limmer Lane, had its first houses by 1918 and many more by 1927. The Blake's Road garden estate was largely built by 1934, and Hurstwood is a 1930s estate of about a hundred houses, a good share of them chalet bungalows. Flansham Park came later, in the 1970s, and Blake's Mead later still.
That age matters to a kitchen fitter more than the style of cupboard you choose. A kitchen in a ninety-year-old house sits on a floor that may have been relaid twice, against walls that were plastered by hand and are rarely square, under a ceiling carrying cables that nobody has drawn. We measure for a Felpham kitchen with that in mind: a laser level across every wall, the floor checked for fall before a single carcass is ordered, and the services traced back to where they actually come from rather than where the last fitter assumed they did.
Want a price that allows for the house you actually have? Ring 07470 078236 and James will come and measure, free.
Keeping the room's character when the kitchen is new
A lot of Felpham kitchen enquiries come from people who bought a Summerley or Beach Estate house because it had picture rails, deep skirtings and proper window reveals, and who do not want a kitchen that pretends those things are not there. That is a design decision, not a fitting one, but it changes what we fit. Wall units stop short of a picture rail rather than cutting through it. Tall housings sit on the wall without the original window, so the reveal stays readable. Skirting is matched in section, not replaced with a modern ovolo because it was easier to buy.
On the chalet bungalows on Hurstwood and along the Beach Estate the challenge runs the other way. The kitchen is often the one ground-floor room with a full ceiling height, the stair is close by, and the space is narrow. A galley that works well in a chalet is a kitchen planned to the millimetre, with drawers rather than deep base cupboards and every appliance placed so two doors never open into each other.
Felpham water is hard, and a new kitchen should be specified for it
Felpham is supplied by Portsmouth Water, which draws mainly from the chalk under the South Downs. Its published figures for the Bognor supply zone put the average at around 300 milligrams per litre of calcium carbonate, which is on the line between hard and very hard. You can see it in the kettle. A new kitchen will see it everywhere else too.
- Taps. Ceramic disc cartridges that can be replaced, not sealed units. A boiling-water tap with a filter that can be changed from the top of the cupboard.
- Softener. If you fit one, Portsmouth Water's own advice is to keep a separate unsoftened tap for drinking, and that means a second cold feed planned before the worktop goes on.
- Dishwasher and washing machine. Isolation valves you can reach without pulling the appliance out, because sooner or later you will need to.
None of that costs much at the plumbing stage. All of it costs a worktop cut-out later.
When the kitchen moves into the garage or the back room
The other common Felpham brief is a kitchen that wants to be somewhere else: through the back wall of a 1950s semi into a dining room, or forward into an integral garage. Both are fine. Both bring rules with them. Taking a wall out is structural and goes through Building Control with an engineer's beam design. Converting a garage brings Felpham's own neighbourhood plan into the picture: Policy GA4 asks for parking to be kept within the plot and for garages to be big enough to park in, and the parish council's planning committee does comment on schemes that lose the only off-road space. If the garage conversion needs permission, we work out where the car goes before the drawing is submitted, not afterwards.
The structural half of that is removing a wall and installing a beam; a kitchen that grows into an extension sits under house extensions in Felpham.
Two parts of Felpham where the ground floor has been wet
West Sussex County Council's record of the June 2012 flood lists 43 Felpham properties affected, with the heaviest numbers on Felpham Way, Wedgwood Road, Davenport Road and Minton Road. Parts of the village also sit in the Environment Agency's warning area on the Aldingbourne Rife. If your kitchen is in one of those roads, it is worth asking us for the version of the job that copes better with water: plinths on adjustable legs rather than packed timber, a tiled or vinyl floor laid right through rather than units sitting on a floating laminate, sockets and the appliance spurs set above the worktop rather than behind the plinth. A kitchen will not stop a flood, but it can be built so that a wet floor costs you a clean-up rather than a refit.
Kitchens for staying put
About 29 per cent of Felpham residents were 65 or over at the 2021 census, and half the homes in the parish are owned outright. Plenty of our Felpham kitchen clients have no intention of moving. That changes the brief in small, useful ways: the oven at waist height rather than under the hob, deep drawers instead of base cupboards, an induction hob with the controls at the front, task lighting under every wall unit, and a sink you can stand at without leaning over a bowl set too far back.
What a Felpham kitchen costs
The bands on our price guide all include VAT. A like-for-like refit in the same layout starts from £6,000 and runs to about £22,800. A full refit with new services and flooring runs from £13,200 to £36,000. A refit with a knock-through, where a wall comes out to join the kitchen to the room behind it, is £22,800 to £50,400. We fit kitchens you have bought yourself and kitchens we supply, and the labour is priced the same either way. A Felpham job is priced on exactly the same rates as one in Bognor Regis, ten minutes from our unit at Middleton.
The wider trade is under kitchen fitting, the village itself is on builders in Felpham, and the nearest town page is kitchen fitting in Bognor Regis.
Send us the supplier's plan, or the road and a photograph of the room, and you will get a written price with every element on its own line. Ring 07470 078236. Workmanship guaranteed for two years, manufacturer warranties passed straight to you, £2m public liability.