Flats and lettings

The apartment page is the private interior and the building's rules

Use the apartment page when the client is dealing with the rooms they occupy: colour, light, furniture and the practical route from the street to the front door. Riverside and period flats in Richmond are not one outlook repeated. The riverside appraisal is supplementary context only. It records residential and mixed building forms, surviving timber windows and a separate status for alterations to flats. It is not evidence that every apartment faces the water, and it is not a commission. Judge samples in the room. Some living rooms take broad daylight. Others look into a lightwell, a side return or across a courtyard. Write down cornices and timber windows that remain, even where a later lining surrounds them. The building still wraps the private job. Ask who may approve work to windows, to the flat entrance door and to anything in the common parts. Householder permitted development is the wrong assumption to import. The council's planning guidance is that those rights do not normally apply to flats, and an Article 4 direction or a conservation control still has to be read for the specific proposal. Flats are part of the recorded fabric on the Hill, and Central Richmond's older houses are often divided or sit behind later frontages. Name which of those you actually have. A mansion flat, a conversion and a riverside apartment do not share a carrying route, even when the paint system on the walls is similar.

Sources: Richmond Council: Richmond Riverside conservation area appraisal; Richmond Council: checking whether planning permission is needed; Richmond Council: Article 4 directions in conservation areas; Richmond Council: Richmond Hill conservation area appraisal; Richmond Council: Central Richmond conservation area appraisal

The lettings page is a vacancy, a scope and a named approver

Use the lettings page when the property is between occupations, or when a tenant is still in place and the basis of access has to change. The useful document is a room list an inventory can be read against later. Vague lines such as a promise to freshen throughout are where arguments start at the next check-in. Name walls, ceilings, skirtings, window boards and both faces of a door if both faces are included. State the exclusions with the same care: a kitchen the landlord is replacing, a bathroom waiting for another trade, tenant's fittings that remain. Share departure, cleaning, inspection and proposed occupation as separate dates. A short vacancy opens the door for access. It does not tell you how much making-ready the surfaces will take. Flaking paint, hollow filling and a ceiling stain each have their own sequence, and a decorative coat should not be asked to hide a leak that nobody has accepted. Nominate the person who can approve colour, extra preparation and a pause. For a flat, add any freeholder or managing-agent instruction. For a protected building, permissions come before a change to a significant surface. If someone is still living there, the occupied-home questions replace the empty-flat assumptions: notice, agreed hours and a room that can actually be emptied.

Where the two pages meet, and where they do not

A landlord refreshing a Richmond flat that someone will live in as a home should read both pages. The apartment page covers light, joinery and the building's rules. The lettings page covers the vacancy, the inventory lines and the approver. An owner who lives in the flat and is not dealing with a tenancy can stay on the apartment page. A house that is let as a whole house uses the lettings page together with the relevant house service, not the apartment page, unless the demise really is a flat. The shared stair of a conversion is a third document when it is in the instruction. That stair lives on the hallway page, because several households may depend on it, and it should not be buried inside a private room list. Do not use the lettings page to decide whether bare brick on a Georgian front may be painted. That question belongs with the period-house pages and, where special interest is affected, with the separate consent appointment. Do not use the apartment page to compress a whole-house family sequence into a single weekend because the postcode is Richmond. The pages meet when you say so in the enquiry. They stay apart when the facts belong to only one of them. Central Richmond, the Hill and the Green can all contain flats or lettings. The postcode starts the conversation. The building, the demise and the person who can approve the work decide which page leads.

Sources: Richmond Council: listed-building painting guidance; Richmond Council: Central Richmond conservation area appraisal; Richmond Council: Richmond Hill conservation area appraisal; Richmond Council: Richmond Green conservation area appraisal

What to send for a Richmond flat or a letting

For the apartment page, send the full address, the floor and a description of the route from the unloading point: stairs, a lift that needs booking, narrow turns and finishes that need protection. Attach the managing agent's written conditions if you have them, including hours and any rule about the window that faces the street. Say whether you will be there to agree a sample. If not, name a keyholder. Photographs should show the room in its own light, not only a swatch. For the lettings page, send the dates as separate events, the name of the approver and the room list with exclusions. Note any stain, and whether the cause has been repaired. Say who clears belongings and who cleans before and after, so that dust from preparation is not left for an inventory photograph. If the proposal changes the outside of a flat, do not rely on a householder exemption. Check the specific control, including any Article 4 schedule that applies to that property. Noisy preparation is not the same thing as quiet painting. The council's normal noisy-work hours are a reference point, and a building rule may be tighter. Ordinary practice on drying is the same in a flat as in a house: follow the product's recoat and use guidance, and do not hand keys across a film that is only superficially dry. Nothing on these pages fixes that interval before the product and the conditions are known.

Sources: Richmond Council: checking whether planning permission is needed; Richmond Council: Article 4 directions in conservation areas; Richmond Council: commercial and construction noise

• Apartment note: floor, carrying route, agent conditions and who can approve a sample
• Lettings note: separate dates, a named approver, inclusions and exclusions
• Shared stair, if included, identified as the hallway instruction
• Any external change checked against the flat's own permissions