Spend here, save there: our real advice

"Where to spend and where to save on a renovation" is one of the most googled questions people ask when they're starting a project. I get it, it's the right question, but the problem is that most of the answers you'll find online are generic, and generic advice tends to point you toward the same safe choices that look good in a listicle but don't account for how a home actually gets lived in or a design that stops you in your tracks.

This is our list (non-exhaustive). It's specific, it's based on what we see on real projects, and some of it might surprise you.

Spend: door and cabinetry hardware

Hardware is the jewellery of a room. It's also one of the few things you touch every single day. The difference between a solid brass handle that has weight and warmth to it and a hollow chrome knockoff is something you feel every time you open a drawer, even if you can't articulate why.

It's also one of the most cost-effective upgrades available. Specifying beautiful hardware across a kitchen or a run of bedroom joinery adds a fraction to the overall build cost and lifts the whole thing. We've never regretted specifying up here. We've occasionally regretted not doing it.

Save: high-end appliances

This is the one that surprises people most. Appliances are where clients are most likely to want to splurge and where we most often push back. A well-regarded mid-range oven performs as well as its luxury counterpart for almost every household. The difference in experience is minimal. The difference in cost is not.

There are exceptions. If you cook seriously and daily, a professional-spec range might genuinely change how you use your kitchen. But for most households, the logic doesn't hold. Spend the difference on the things that stay when the appliances are eventually replaced.

Spend: recessed plaster downlights

Lighting is the single most underinvested element in most renovations. Standard downlights, the kind with visible trim rings, are fine, but they date a room and interrupt a ceiling in a way that's hard to unsee once you've noticed it. Recessed plaster lights disappear into the ceiling entirely and, combined with a well-considered lighting plan, transform how a room feels at every hour of the day.

The installation cost is higher but the result is a room that looks genuinely finished rather than lit.

Save: internal doors

Internal doors matter less than people think. A clean, well-hung door in a good quality paint finish reads perfectly well in almost any interior. It's not that doors are unimportant, it's that the premium for a "designer" internal door rarely shows up in the finished room the way spending the same money on something else would.

If doors are a passion, spend on them. But if you're looking for somewhere to claw back budget, this is a great place to find it. If you spend money on a gorgeous handle or knob, even on a plain door, the whole thing feels elevated and expensive - your friends will be impressed.

Spend: the anchor tile

In any room with tiling, there is usually one tile that sets the tone. It might be a gorgeous textured wall tile in a bathroom or a lovely traditional mosaic floor tile in an entrance. This is the tile to spend on. It's what the room is built around, and the quality of the material shows in a way that a good photograph can't fully capture.

Elsewhere, the secondary tiles, the practical surfaces, there is almost always a strong option at a sensible price point. We have many favourites that we use time and time again and they never fail us.

Save: statement light fittings in secondary spaces

A beautiful pendant in the right location can anchor a room. But a beautiful pendant in a corridor, a utility room, or a downstairs WC is unlikely to be the thing that makes or breaks the space, and statement fittings in secondary locations often read as slightly effortful rather than confident. A simpler, well-made fitting in these spaces, and genuine investment in the rooms where it counts, is definitely the stronger choice.

Spend: underfloor heating under stone or tile

If your renovation includes stone or tile floors, especially in kitchens and bathrooms, underfloor heating is essential, it’s not a luxury. A cold stone floor is a daily friction point in a way that's easy to dismiss at the specification stage and impossible to ignore once you're living with it. The retrofit cost is significant and completely disruptive but the installation cost during a renovation is manageable. This is almost always worth doing at the time.

The underlying principle here is permanence.

We spend on the things that are hard to change, expensive to replace, and present every day. We save on the things that are replaceable, trend-dependent, or less noticed than the budget suggests.

When budgets get squeezed, it's usually the wrong things that get cut - the invisible, expensive-to-fix stuff quietly disappears from the spec while the flashy showroom purchases stay. Our job, in part, is to catch that before it happens.