Digging a basement can double the cost of an extension, but giving it good reason to be there – and celebrating the way you get to it – can make it the best room in the building.

On the evening of the day we bought our engagement rings in 1996, Deborah and I went out to celebrate. Clutching our left hands in a fist in case the rings fell off, we headed for Mezzo on Wardour Street in the centre of Soho. Mezzo was a Conran restaurant, one of a new generation of eateries that combined good food with mass dining, a world away from the stuffy places London was better known for at the time. It had been converted out of the old Marquee Club a year earlier, and had what soon became a unifying element in all the Conran restaurants: a great sense of arrival.

 

The restaurant (now known as 100 Wardour Street) was in the basement, a notoriously difficult space to make feel amazing due to the lack of light and low ceilings. Conran’s answer was to design one of the most famous stairs of its time, a sweeping white sculpture in the middle of the room with the kind of metal handrail usually kept for ocean liners. It was the perfect width for two people to walk down side by side.

 

And this was his genius move. You’d get dressed up to go to Mezzo, simply so you could glide down that stair like Fred and Ginger under the gaze of hundreds of fellow diners – all of whom had just had their own moment on the catwalk. You went to Mezzo not just for the food, but for the spectacle of that stair, the sense of arrival that made you feel like a million dollars.

 

That memory has stuck with me for every basement project we do. It’s our job to make the basement the best room in the building, to give it good reason to be there. Given that clients spend up to double the usual rate for an extension to dig out a basement, it’s a waste to just use it for storage and utility.

 

Instead, the stair to your basement should give you that Mezzo-like sense of arrival as you sashay down to your very own after-hours Shoreditch bar, perfectly equipped spa or gym, or private Soho cinema. It should feel like an invitation rather than a barrier. At Conran’s restaurants, the prices and the aura of glamour were the barriers to entry, but once you were ‘in’, everything about the journey through the building was effortless – and that’s exactly how digging down should feel.