Designer claims £100,000 kitchen sank after neighbours built new basement

An interior designer is locked in a court battle with her wealthy neighbours over claims their basement extension has caused her floor to sink and ruined a £100,000 kitchen.

Reiko Stewart, 65, and her husband Hugh say subterranean excavation by international financier Bis Subramanian, 53, and his partner Laura Vidal-Oregui Subramanian, 55, has created a “tilt” in the kitchen floor, meaning handmade Smallbone cabinets need to be replaced.

Digging was allowed at the Subramanians’ £10 million Kensington home on condition it “must not cause unnecessary inconvenience to adjoining owners”. The Stewarts are now fighting for £100,000 in compensation.

However, Mr and Mrs Subramanian deny they are liable for “structural movement” in the Stewarts’ £8.5 million home, and claim the kitchen floor slope was “not caused by their work at all”.

The High Court heard Mr Subramanian, a private equity fund managing director and former vice president at Morgan Stanley, and his wife had begun work by 2014 on a basement under their six-bedroom home and most of the back garden. When Mrs Stewart, who runs Argyll Design, and her husband complained of damage to parts of their home, the neighbours each appointed a surveyor to assess the house and they agreed building work was responsible for the sinking kitchen floor.

A third neutral surveyor ruled the Subramanians should pay compensation, including £85,950 for the damage to the kitchen cabinets which would have to be replaced once work had been done to level the floor.

However, the Subramanians’ surveyor withdrew before the Party Wall Award process could be completed and they appointed a new surveyor who took a different view of the situation. He claimed that the kitchen floor slope had nothing to do with the basement extension next door and, in his view, it “predated that work altogether”.

City of London magistrates ruled in July last year that the Subramanians should pay the compensation as a civil debt, but High Court Judge Rowena Collins Rice has overturned that decision and said in light of new expert evidence the issue has not yet been resolved.

She said that until the new assessment, both couples were “mutually going along with the idea” that the excavation had caused the Stewarts’ floor to sink, as this is what their surveyors had said.

“But going along with an idea based on professional advice is not the same thing as being legally bound by it,” she added. Judge Collins Rice said the value of the damage to the kitchen would stand but it was not yet decided if the Subramanians would have to pay it.

The dispute will now return to the neutral surveyor to make a fresh determination on the Stewarts’ bid for a Party Wall Award.