Can you have wood floors in your flat? 

In such circumstances, disgruntled neighbours can ask landlords to enforce the lease terms to require the leaseholder with wooden floors to replace with carpet and underlay. Whether that succeeds will depend on the terms of the lease as well as the licence permitting wooden floors to be installed. If the terms are drafted to reserve a right to require the leaseholder to install carpet on notice, there is little the offending leaseholder can do and expensive wooden flooring will need to be covered over or replaced with carpet. However, the position is different if no such provision exists. Where a landlord has agreed to a leaseholder installing wooden flooring, the landlord cannot subsequently enforce the lease to require that same leaseholder to cover the floors. That was the decision in the Court of Appeal case Faidi and another v Elliot Corporation.

In Faidi, the lease stated that the leaseholder was “At all times to cover and keep covered with carpet and underlay the floors of [the flat] other than those of the kitchen and bathrooms…”. The leaseholder carried out substantial alterations to the flat, including the installation of wooden flooring, sound insulation and approximately £100,000 worth of underfloor heating (which would be useless if carpeting had to be re-installed). The licence provided that the leaseholder’s obligations under the lease were to “continue to be applicable to the [flat] when and as altered as permitted by this licence”. Installing wooden flooring was clearly incompatible with the lease requirement to carpet but the court found that, by consenting to the works, this requirement was waived. The licence’s general provision for the lease obligations to continue (as above) could not override a specific agreement reached between the landlord and the leaseholder for the installation of wooden flooring, sound insulation and underfloor heating. Otherwise the carpeting requirement would frustrate the very essence of the permitted works.

In such cases, the court’s powers are limited to say whether carpet should be reinstalled on the terms of the lease and licence. But, on a practical level, parties may be able to resolve their dispute, for example by partial carpeting such as leaving a wooden border or laying rugs. This would retain some of the aesthetic attraction of wooden flooring and keeps some of the benefit of expensive underfloor heating, whilst softening noise emanating to neighbouring properties.