£2.5m Fitzrovia apartment owners lose lawsuit over noisy facade

The leasehold owners of a £2.5m apartment in a new block in Fitzroy Place, W1, have failed in their bid to sue the freeholder and developer of the building over banging and popping that they say wakes them up in the night. The claimant, Naziral Tejani, bought the 990-year leasehold to the property off plan in 2015 as a London pied-à-terre but has spend few nights in the apartment, saying that the noises wake him and his family up and ruin their enjoyment of the property. The noise, according to court documents, comes from the expansion and contraction of the building’s facade and should usually sound like a soft click, about as loud as the clicking of a button on a mouse. The case went to trial in October and the judge, Veronique Buehrlen KC, heard evidence from experts in facade engineering and acoustics as well as the owner and his family and neighbours. The owner said that on a number of occasions he had been woken up by “a loud bang”. Although the judge said she felt it was his “genuinely held belief”, he was “vague and sometimes confused”. The owner’s son maintained the apartment was “uninhabitable and unusable” and described loud thuds, while his daughter likened the sound to “a gun shot in the distance”, adding that it was “definitely louder than a champaigne cork”. The experts, who carried out a survey of the building, discovered occasional ticking sounds which, at their worst, could be 45 decibels, which is categorised as “quiet”. The judge found that the sound did not constitute a nuisance. She agreed that it did count as a defect, but said the owner had not told the developer about it soon enough, and had instead complained about the sound of footsteps from a flat above. Nazirali Sharif Tejani v (1) Fitzroy Place Residential Ltd (2) 2-10 Mortimer Street Gp Ltd as a general partner of 2-10 Mortimer Street Limited Partnership Technology and Construction Court (Veronique Buehrlen KC) 2 November 2022 Photo © Pawel Czerwinski/Unsplash