Effingham Road, London, SE12

@tanyabaker.co.uk can be visited on Instagram to see the video tour of this home.

A Beautifully Presented Family Home With Side Access, A Driveway and a 70ft South Facing Garden. This pretty house has four double bedrooms, a superb skylit kitchen-diner that opens onto a landscaped garden and a spacious loft suite that feels like a private retreat.

Some families treat updating a house as a project to finish and quickly move on with their lives. This family just kept improving - not because anything needed it, but because they genuinely loved the place and wanted to make it even better. The difference in how it now feels is obvious from the moment you walk in.

The ground floor sets the tone. The front lounge has a pretty feature fireplace, high ceilings, wood floors and a shuttered bay window with beautiful double glazed timber sash windows.

Behind it, a second reception room with custom cabinetry works brilliantly as a playroom, a reading room or a home office with a door to the kitchen you can close if you need some peace and quiet.

Wood floors run from the hall through the lounge and all the way into the kitchen, giving the whole ground floor a natural sense of flow. There's also a recently renovated downstairs WC finished with Fired Earth tiles - when the smallest room is this good, it signals the level of care applied throughout.

The extension looks to be one of the largest on the street, and the photos don't quite do the scale justice. It stretches almost 25 feet, with a large central island with bar seating, four ovens (one a microwave, one a steamer - genuinely useful at Christmas), underfloor heating and an Insinkerator tap.

Electric Velux skylights run the length of the ceiling and bifold doors stretch across the full width of the back wall, so from around April through to October, the line between inside and outside more or less disappears.

The south facing landscaped garden gets the sun for most of the day. There's a large paved patio directly off the kitchen, a lawn beyond it, a vegetable patch in raised sleepers, uplighting for evenings and an automatic awning for warmer and brighter days. There's side access too, and at just over 70ft, the garden is bigger and quieter than you'd expect in the conservation area.

Upstairs on the first floor there are three double bedrooms, all recently redecorated and recarpeted. The family bathroom was created by knocking two separate rooms into one larger and more luxurious space with Crosswater fittings and a heavy-duty glass shower screen.

Our clients use the top floor bedroom as their main, and it's easy to see why. It's an impressive double with bespoke-built wardrobes, natural light from a Velux window and its own en-suite - finished with Fired Earth tiles and brass fittings.

Throughout the house, Corston Architectural switches, handles and plugs have been fitted across every room - a recent whole-house upgrade that you notice without necessarily knowing why. Hive heating runs throughout and can be controlled remotely from your phone, something you’ll grow to love on a cold winter morning when you're still tucked up in bed.

A large storage loft sits off the landing, the kind of practical space needed for Christmas trees and luggage.

Outside at the front, the brickwork has just been fully repointed and cleaned, with a freshly painted pink front door that has new hardware (we love the rose knocker!). There's gated off-street parking on the drive with an EV charger - something of a rarity on Effingham Road, where conservation area restrictions mean no new off-street parking can be created. A bike shed keeps the scooters, bikes and balls safely tucked away.

Effingham Road sits within the Lee Conservation Area, which keeps the street looking as it should and the traffic light. Brindishe Lee Primary School is just a few doors away, which makes the morning routine easy and meaning there’s no non-residents parking at drop-off and pick-up times - making it quieter and safer than most family streets in this part of London.

The road is also particularly special. There’s an occasional summer street party and play dates are frequent among the road’s families. Our clients couldn’t speak more highly of the road; it’s a true rare community with a WhatsApp group and neighbours who really look out for you.

Lee and Hither Green stations are both under a ten-minute walk away, with trains to London Bridge in around ten minutes and Cannon Street in under fifteen. If you need the DLR, Lewisham station is a short bus journey away and from there you’ll be at Canary Wharf in just seventeen minutes.

Blackheath Village is about fifteen minutes on foot, with its bars, restaurants and boutiques. The Brindishe schools and Colfe's are all nearby, as is a lovely local nursery, nestled just around the corner.

A house that they never planned to put on the market - improved year after year by a family who loved living here, in a street that's likely to make you feel exactly the same way.

KEY FEATURES

• Four bedroom Victorian family home in the Lee Conservation Area, finished to an exceptional standard throughout

• The largest kitchen extension on the street, with bifold doors opening onto a landscaped south-facing garden

• Four ovens including a steamer and microwave combination, central island and underfloor heating in the kitchen

• Loft suite with Velux window, built-in wardrobes and an ensuite finished with Fired Earth tiles and brass fittings

• Three more double bedrooms on the first floor, all recently redecorated and recarpeted

• Luxurious family bathroom knocked from two rooms into one

• Corston architectural switches, handles and plugs fitted throughout, plus Hive remote heating across the whole house

• Off-street parking with an EV charger

• Lee and Hither Green stations both under ten minutes' walk away - London Bridge around ten minutes by train

• A school street in the Lee Conservation Area, with a nursery nearby and the Brindishe schools and Colfe's all within easy reach