Loft Conversions in Pagham
A village of bungalows, which is good news for lofts
Pagham is single-storey living strung out between the harbour and the sea: detached and semi-detached bungalows through the village and Nyetimber, chalets and former holiday homes nearer the beach that are now lived in all year. Almost everyone who rings us about a loft here is asking the same question. The house is the right house, the garden is the right garden, and the only way to get another bedroom without giving either up is to go into the roof. Whether that works depends on three things, and we can usually tell you two of them from the doorstep.
Height, stair, floor
Height first. A 1950s or 60s bungalow with a hipped roof often has less than two metres under the ridge, and converting it means either a dormer large enough to put the usable floor under a flat ceiling, or taking a hip to a gable to win the volume back. Raising the ridge itself is not permitted development and is a planning application with a real chance of refusal, so we design around the roof you have.
The stair second. A bungalow plan never expected one. It usually comes out of a hall cupboard, the corner of a bedroom or the end of a kitchen, and where it lands decides the whole layout downstairs. We draw it before anything else, because a loft nobody can get up to comfortably is not a loft.
The floor third, and this is the one people underestimate. The ceiling joists in a bungalow were sized to hold a ceiling and some insulation. A new floor goes in above them, designed, on new bearings, and that single decision moves the price more than any rooflight or dormer. One thing works in your favour: the new floor in a bungalow usually sits below the 4.5 metre trigger in Approved Document B, which keeps the fire strategy simpler than it is on a taller house.
Arun, overlooking and the beach estate
Arun District Council decides planning here, and on an ordinary bungalow a rear dormer or a hip-to-gable is normally permitted development within the 50 cubic metre allowance. We apply for a lawful development certificate so it is on paper. Where Arun does press is overlooking, and bungalow conversions are exactly where it presses: lift a single-storey house and your new windows arrive at first-floor level above gardens nobody has ever looked down into. That is solved on the drawing — window positions, sill heights, obscure glazing to a side elevation — not argued about after a refusal.
Nearer the front, the Pagham Beach Estate is a special case. The council adopted an interim development framework for it in 2021 and looks harder at anything built there because of the coastal processes along that frontage. A loft does not change the footprint, which helps, but the drawings still go through that extra scrutiny and we build it into the programme rather than pretend it is not there.
The weather is the specification
A dormer on a Pagham roof faces the sea, the wind off the harbour or both, for the rest of its life. The cladding fixings are marine-grade stainless, the glazing powder-coated aluminium, and the flat roof on top a warm roof with a membrane rated for the exposure. Rooflights are specified for the wind loading rather than picked from a catalogue. Standard exterior ironmongery on this coast will not see out three years, and a loft is the wrong place to find that out.
What it costs here
A Pagham loft is priced on the same rates as one in Bognor Regis, and the bands are on the price guide, every figure before VAT. A rooflight-only conversion on a bungalow that already has the height is the cheapest loft there is; a hip-to-gable with a rear dormer and a bathroom is the most involved. Most Pagham jobs sit between the two, and the quotation after the visit is itemised past two hundred lines so you can see exactly where yours sits.
Where to start
The wider service is loft conversions; the town page is loft conversions in Bognor Regis, and the village is on builders in Pagham. If the real plan is a bigger bungalow rather than a taller one, see house extensions in Pagham. Our next job in the village is a level-access wet room on Rose Green Road, which says something about how much of Pagham is thinking about staying put.
Send a photograph of the back of the house and one up the hatch, and James will tell you whether the roof has the height before you spend anything on drawings. Ring 07470 078236. Building around Bognor Regis since 2008, £2m public liability with employers' liability alongside it, quotations itemised line by line.