Quarterly market notes · Q1 2026
Where heritage kitchens are landing this quarter, and what the value bands tell us.
First quarter of 2026 is on file. Across the UK, premium-tier residential applications — the kind that produce £80k+ kitchens — held up better than the general residential market, and the geography shifted in ways worth noticing if you’re setting your studio’s region preferences for the next quarter.
The headline
Total premium-tier applications across England, Wales, and Scotland in Q1 2026 were broadly flat against Q1 2025 — down roughly 2% — but the distribution moved noticeably toward the South West and away from outer London. Applications in the Cotswolds, north Somerset, and west Wiltshire grew by double digits; applications in zones 4–6 of London fell by similar amounts.
The picture suggests two things: the continuing slow drift of premium homeowners out of the capital toward larger Georgian and Victorian properties in the South West, and a tightening of zones 4–6 London where stamp duty and the upper end of the residential market both compressed during the quarter.
Where the kitchens went
Of the heritage-tier applications we’ve read this quarter, the median kitchen scope sits at £112k, up about 3.5% on Q4 2025 and roughly in line with general construction inflation. The top decile — projects whose extracted kitchen scope crosses £200k — was concentrated in three corridors:
The Cotswolds and west Oxfordshire. A continuing run of Georgian rectories, manor houses, and substantial farmhouses being acquired and re-fitted. Average extension footprint around 32 m². Average kitchen scope £145k.
The Surrey hills, west and south-west of London. 1920s and 1930s detached houses with large rear plots. Many applications are partial demolition + replacement extension at the rear. Average extension footprint around 38 m². Average kitchen scope £128k.
Edinburgh New Town and the southern suburbs. Listed townhouses with re-modelled lower-ground floors. Smaller footprints (typical 22 m²) but higher per-sqm spend due to listed-building constraints. Average kitchen scope £138k.
The architects to watch
Three patterns stand out in the architect data this quarter, none of which are about specific practice names:
Smaller practices are filing more. The number of applications from practices with fewer than five named partners rose 8% quarter-on-quarter across the heritage tier. The implication: fewer of the top-tier briefs are going to the larger, well-known architectural firms; more are going to studios of three to five people with a clear regional or stylistic identity. Kitchen designers building relationships with smaller practices are likely to see better hit-rates than those chasing the big names.
Heritage specialists are growing faster than general-practice firms.Practices whose portfolio is dominated by listed-building work grew their application count by roughly 12% quarter-on-quarter. General-practice firms whose portfolios mix new-build, commercial, and residential work were broadly flat. The premium kitchen brief, more than ever, is associated with heritage specialism on the architect side.
Cross-region work is rare. Of the practices filing three or more applications this quarter, fewer than 10% had projects in more than two UK regions. The vast majority work in tight geographic clusters. For a kitchen designer, this means the architect’s region tells you almost everything about where their next brief will land.
The single most useful question to ask an architect on a first call: which other projects are on their book in the next six months. The answer almost always names two or three more in the same village, postcode, or county.
Heritage filtering this quarter
Roughly 28% of heritage-tier applications this quarter involved a Grade II listed property, with another 11% in Grade II* or Grade I. Conservation Area designations covered another 34% of applications, with overlapping listings on about 18% of those. Net: about three-quarters of the premium-kitchen applications this quarter had at least one heritage constraint of some kind.
The conservation-officer feedback patterns held steady from Q4: glazing reductions remain the most common ask (about 40% of heritage applications get a glazing-related condition), followed by material substitution (roughly 28%) and roof-form revision (about 18%). Each of these has direct consequences for the kitchen designer’s eventual scope.
What we’d watch for in Q2
Two trends to keep an eye on between now and the next quarterly notes:
First, the South West densification. If the Q1 trajectory continues, by Q3 we’d expect the Cotswolds-and-west-Wiltshire corridor to overtake outer London by absolute application count. Kitchen designers based further north or in the Midlands may want to consider whether to register the South West as a working region.
Second, the smaller-practice trend. If it holds, the relationship-building strategy that worked five years ago — chase the dozen biggest names — will increasingly underperform versus the strategy of building relationships with thirty smaller, regionally-rooted practices. The implication for a studio’s outreach is real; we’ll write more about this in May.
Method note. Numbers are drawn from the Q1 2026 application set we read across UK council planning portals, filtered for residential applications with works likely to include a kitchen relocation, replacement, or new-build kitchen of meaningful scope. Median figures use the kitchen-scope estimates we extract from architect drawings, which are calibrated against approved comparables in our index. They’re directional, not exact.