About
A family business, building in London
Artan Petic started Home Constructive on a simple idea: that careful build and design work should not only be available to people who can afford to stop asking what it costs.
Artan Petic
Founder · Home Constructive
How it started
Artan Petic finished university and went to work with his older brother. Bash was a plumber and needed a pair of hands, and it was meant to be the thing you do while you work out what you are going to do.
He was not the only one in the family already in a trade. Ben was working as an electrician. Nick, the youngest, was becoming the kind of builder who can also plumb — the one on site everybody ends up asking. Between them they could take a house apart and put it back together again.
What Artan noticed, moving between their jobs, was that the trades were rarely the problem. The problem was that nobody was holding the order of things. First fix goes in for a kitchen layout that is still being argued about. A steel is fabricated before anyone has decided where the soil stack is going. Three good firms, none of whom have spoken to each other, each of them right about their own part of the house and none of them answerable for the whole of it.
His view was that if the people who understood the plumbing, the electrics and the structure sat down together before anything was lifted and settled the sequence, most of what goes wrong on a London house would simply not happen. That is not a clever idea. It is an obvious one that almost nobody is set up to act on, because it asks one firm to care about all of it.
Home Constructive is that idea run as a business. Artan founded it and still runs it, and it is still a family firm — small enough that the person who quotes your job is the person answerable for it.
That is not a sentimental detail. It is the reason the company is shaped the way it is. A family business cannot hide behind a department. There is no estimating team who never see the site, no contracts manager who inherits a price somebody else invented. The people who look at your house are the people who build it, and they carry the consequences of anything they got wrong on the doorstep.
What Artan set out to do
The founding intent was to make quality build and design work accessible at a reasonable cost. It is worth being precise about what that means, because reasonable cost is a phrase every builder in London uses and almost none of them explain.
It does not mean cheapest. A price that undercuts everybody else on a structural job is usually a price with something missing from it, and the missing thing turns up later as a variation. What it means here is that the money goes into the parts of the work you will live with — the structure, the levels, the light, the details that are impossible to fix afterwards — and not into the parts that exist to make a quotation look impressive.
In practice it comes down to being specific early. Deciding the beam arrangement before the steel is fabricated. Establishing the foundation depth before anyone prices the groundworks. Serving the party wall notices alongside the planning application rather than after it. Every one of those is a decision that costs nothing to make properly and a great deal to make late.
The people we build with
Home Constructive works through a standing set of suppliers and specialist trades across London — joiners, structural engineers, kitchen and bathroom fitters, glaziers, steel fabricators — most of whom have worked with us for a long time.
The point of holding those relationships rather than assembling a team job by job is that it stays one chain of responsibility. You are not handed a list of numbers and told to arrange your own joinery. If a crittall opening does not sit right, that is our conversation with the fabricator, not yours.
Because the people involved know how we build, the sequencing works: the joiner has measured before the plasterer finishes, the electrician has been through before the boards go on, and the programme holds together rather than becoming a series of waits. It is also the honest reason a family-run firm can take on work of this size — not by being bigger than it is, but by having spent a long time finding people who turn up.
What we do, and what we don’t
We build extensions, loft conversions, kitchen and bathroom work, whole-house renovations and basement conversions. Structural work on existing London houses and flats, in other words, rather than anything built from scratch.
We do not do new build, we do not do commercial, and we do not work in every postcode in London. There are a few boroughs we know properly, where we have completed work, and where we understand the housing stock, the ground conditions and the way the council reads its own design guidance. Outside those, somebody local will do a better job than we would, and we will say so rather than take the enquiry anyway.
Where we are
Home Constructive Ltd is registered in England and Wales, at an address in Uxbridge. We work across Wandsworth, Merton and Wimbledon, Richmond upon Thames, Croydon, Herne Hill and Lambeth, and our own patch in Uxbridge and Hillingdon.
Most of the work is south of the river. The office is west of it, which is why Hillingdon appears on a list otherwise dominated by south London terraces.
The projects are written up in full
The most useful thing on this website is not this page. It is the portfolio, where every project we have completed is written up with the decision that mattered on it — what the house presented, what we chose to do about it, and what we would tell you if it were yours.
That is a better guide to whether we are the right firm for your job than anything we could say about ourselves here.
Common questions about the firm
Who runs Home Constructive?
Artan Petic founded the firm and still runs it. It remains a family business, which is why the person who quotes your job is the person answerable for it.
Is Home Constructive a limited company?
Yes. Home Constructive Ltd, company number 09287521, registered at 65 Churchill Road, Uxbridge, London UB10 0FN.
Do you subcontract the work out?
The trades that matter are in the family firm rather than hired in job by job. That is the point of how the company is set up: the plumbing, the electrics and the structure are settled together before anything is lifted, instead of three separate firms each being right about their own part and none of them answerable for the whole house.
Meet us at the house
The quickest way to judge a builder is to have one stand in the room you want changed and tell you what the building will allow. That is what the survey is. It is free, it carries no obligation, and you will get a straight answer at the end of it.
“Communication is second to none, always providing proactive and transparent updates.”Dylan Titherley · Read the Google reviews