What is a house?

Day and another v Hosebay Ltd; Howard de Walden Estates Ltd v Lex Gorge Ltd [2010] EWCA Civ 748; TLR 10 August

In conjoined appeals, the court was required to determine the meaning and effect of the Leasehold Reform Act 1967 s2(1), and the question of what constituted a ‘house’ for the purpose of that section. In each appeal, the respondent tenants were companies. The tenant in the first appeal had acquired long leases on three properties in a terrace of buildings that had been fully adapted to provide several individual rooms for letting, and were used as short-term accommodation for tourists and other visitors. The premises were originally constructed and first occupied as large houses, and were described as a messuage or dwelling house in the leases. The tenant in the second appeal had also acquired a long lease on a property that was designed, built and initially used as a town house residence for a single family. The property maintained its physical appearance externally, but, in accordance with the lease that the upper floors were restricted to residential use and the lower floors to office use, internal works had been done so that the lower floors could be used as offices. The whole of the property was however being used as offices at the relevant date. The tenants gave notice to acquire the freeholds of the properties under the Leasehold Reform Act 1967 s8. Those notices were resisted by the appellant landlords on the basis that the premises were not houses under s2(1) of the Act as they could not be described as a ‘house reasonably so called’. The first tenant’s notice was also resisted on the basis that the premises were not a ‘house’ as they were not ‘designed or adapted for living in’. In each case, the courts rejected the landlords’ contentions and held that the premises were houses under s2(1).