A millionaire hipster couple have been ordered to pay £130,000 in court costs after suing their neighbour over a loft extension that touched their home.
Liz and Adam Peck tried to force their neighbour Debbie Ranford to tear down her extension by dragging her to court.
They accused her of "trespassing" on their property when building the roof extension at her flat in fashionable East Dulwich, London.
However, Central London County Court refused to order a demolition and instead told them to pay their own and almost all of their neighbour's legal bills.
The Pecks claimed Mrs Ranford built her extension only about an inch from their own loft room, with her builder then joining the two dormers by installing "infill" material on the Pecks' side of the boundary.
Last month, the Pecks sued their banker neighbour, who had been a family friend, demanding that she be forced to dismantle the loft extension.
Judge Simon Monty QC said the Pecks should not have taken the case to a full county court trial and agreed that they had attempted to use a "sledgehammer to crack a nut" over the minor boundary issue.
During the trial, the court heard that banker Mrs Ranford built the loft room at her two-storey flat in affluent Bellenden Road, south London, in 2014 after getting consent from the Pecks.
Mrs Ranford, who works in regulatory reporting in a City bank, arranged for her neighbours to sign a Party Wall Notice to consent to the work.
But Mrs Peck told the court she was horrified when she learned that - in order to get a bigger loft room - Mrs Ranford's builder had built on the boundary line and encroached onto their property to join the dormers.
Giving evidence, the 49-year-old told Judge Monty that the work they consented to should have stopped short of the boundary between the two properties.
Their own loft conversion was itself just under an inch back from the party wall and they understood Mrs Ranford's room was to be positioned to leave a gap between the two properties to allow for maintenance.
The first Mrs Peck knew of it having been joined onto hers was when a roofer was investigating the cause of a leak and shouted down that her neighbour had built onto and over the boundary, she said.
"We had no awareness that next door had built up and onto our property," Mrs Peck told the judge.
"To see that, you have to be right at the end of our garden.
"Given the party wall notice we had signed, we had no cause to check on the works."
Her husband Adam Peck added: "It was quite a shock to understand and discover that something very different had been built."
Representing the couple, barrister Richard Egleton said Mrs Ranford had opted not to leave a gap between the two extensions because she did not want to have a smaller loft room.
Instead of leaving a gap, the builder had extended the party wall upwards to use as the outer wall of Mrs Ranford's loft room, with the gap between the two dormers filled with material on the Pecks' side to prevent weather damage.
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The barrister claimed the work had resulted in a "clear trespass" and that Mrs Ranford should be ordered to dismantle the dormer.
Mrs Ranford fought her neighbours' case, claiming that the Pecks consented to her building on top of the party wall separating the two properties and that the work she had carried out to join the rooms was "unavoidable."
The amendment to the original scheme, bringing the two dormers together, was due to fire regulations, and the Pecks had consented to that amendment, she claimed.
None of her actual extension is on the Pecks' side of the boundary, with the only material on their property being the "infill" material used to join and weather-proof the two structures, she said.
In his ruling, Judge Monty accepted that Mrs Ranford's builder had explained to Mrs Peck that he intended to build on the party wall, but that she had not actually agreed to it.
However, he said he would not make an injunction ordering Mrs Ranford to pull down her loft extension because the resulting trespass was "very minor" and instead awarded the Pecks £200 damages.
In a hearing to decide who pays for the case yesterday, Mrs Ranford's barrister Howard Smith said she had desperately wanted to avoid the "enormous costs" of a trial and had offered her neighbours £13,000 to settle the case earlier, but it had been refused.
Giving judgment, Judge Monty agreed that the case should have been settled and that Mrs Ranford had ultimately won because there was never any hope that a judge would order demolition of a well-built extension because of a minor trespass.
