The Court of Appeal ruled today that the front doors of a pair of flats in Knightsbridge aren’t the landlord’s fittings, they are, in fact, part of the land demised to the tenant under the lease.
The dispute is between Marlborough Knightsbridge Management, the freehold owner of 61 Walton Street, SW3, and the leaseholder of two flats in the building.
There are 168 flats in the building, which is in the middle of Knightsbridge, central London, and all of them are let on long leases. The flats in question are on 999-year leases, dated from 1991.
The dispute began when, in 2019, the tenant replaced the front doors of the flats without seeking the landlord’s consent.
The landlord sued the tenant in the First-tier Tribunal arguing that the tenant had breached the lease, which barred the tenant from removing the “landlord’s fixtures”.
The First-tier Tribunal backed the landlord. The tenant appealed to the Upper Tribunal and won. The landlord then appealed to the Court of Appeal, where the judges agreed with the tenant.
Lord Justice Arnold, who wrote the relatively brief judgment, said that the phrase “landlord’s fixtures” is a legal term and should be treated as such.
“It is therefore idle to suppose that it was intended that it should be interpreted as if it were free from any technical meaning,” he said.
It is also, he said, a term that has been criticised by judges in other cases.
“The starting point when considering this issue is that every building is composed of things, such as bricks, mortar and so on, which were chattels prior to their incorporation into the building,” he said.
“Once incorporated into the building, however, they become part of the land. Thus their legal status changes from being personal property to being real property.”
This, he said, applies to doors too.
“The entrance doors in the present case were part of the original structure of the flats. Moreover, they were an essential part of the structure, since they afforded privacy and security to the tenant(s),” he said.
“It is no doubt true that the doors were affixed to the walls (via door frames) by hinges after the walls were built, but that is immaterial. No one would say that the construction of a flat was complete if the entrance door had not yet been hung.”
As a result, he ruled that the doors were part of the property and not fixtures.
Lawyers for the landlord argued that the reason for the clause stopping leaseholders from removing fixtures was to ensure common areas looked the same and we sage.
This, the judge said, might have been the intention but it was not the effect.
“While one can well understand that a landlord might wish to have control over the replacement of external doors, this part of [the] clause… is not apt for that purpose once it is concluded that an external door is part of the demised property and not a fixture.”
“Whether other provisions in the Leases might be apt for that purpose is not an issue which is before this Court,” he said.
Marlborough Knightsbridge Management Limited- and – Thierry Gilles Fivaz
Court of Appeal (Henderson LJ, Arnold LJ, Birss LJ), 6 July 2021
James Fieldsend (instructed by Bolt Burdon) for the Appellant Nick Grant (instructed by Direct Access) for the Respondent
