A Golders Green property management company has been ordered to dismantle its offices, which had been built without proper permission across three adjacent back gardens.
Esther and Joseph Gurvits, the proprietors of Eagerstates Ltd, a company that specialises in the management of long lease flats, challenged an enforcement notice issued by Barnet Council in 2021. However, in a ruling handed down yesterday, High Court judge Mr Justice Mould dismissed their legal action and backed the council’s decision.
According to the ruling, when a council property inspector visited the premises on Hurstwood Road, N11, in July 2021, they found a large outbuilding in the back garden made up of three linked sections. The building had three private office rooms, a shared office room, a reception, a kitchenette, and male and female toilets.
The building spanned three adjacent gardens that had been linked into one complex at some point in the last 10 years.
The council ordered the Gurvits to:
- Cease the use of the outbuilding as a commercial office and associated storage.
- Permanently remove all kitchen units, sinks, cooking facilities and worktops from the outbuilding.
- Permanently remove all toilets from the outbuilding.
The couple appealed the decision to the High Court and the case went to trial last December.
According to the ruling, the family bought the first property as a family home in 1990 and ran their business from a spare bedroom. In the late 1990s they built an outbuilding in the garden under permitted development rights that was used as a home office.
They bought the second property in 1999 and the third in 2013. Both properties are inhabited by family members and they built outbuildings – also under permitted development rights – in each garden.
The property inspector found that, while the three buildings had been constructed under permitted development rights rules, “some time after 2017 the appellant’s property business expanded and, as a consequence, the outbuildings were connected to form a single larger office with associated storage. Therefore, the office space became no longer incidental to the dwelling houses, but rather a material change of use had occurred for which planning permission was required”.
Lawyers for the Gurvits argued that the use of the land as an office has existed since 1991, from a bedroom in the house. The office relocated to the outbuilding in 1998. They argued that each of the buildings were built legally and separately as office or storage space, so no breach of planning regulations occurred.
However, the judge found that the property inspector was entitled to draw the conclusions they did, based on extra evidence presented to a pubic inquiry.
He ruled that the enforcement notice should stand, which gives the family five months to stop using the outbuilding as a commercial office and remove the kitchen and toilets.
Gurvits and another v Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities and another
Administrative Court (Mr Justice Mould) 6 March 2024
