Design & Planning
Entry posted by BadgerBadger in Lessons from the road...
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We are building a four-bed detached house in the south of England and for a whole host of reasons (well mainly privacy!) I thought I’d try a blog in a slightly different way. I’ve been making notes of “lessons” we’ve learnt along the way and I thought I’d try and write them up whilst we progress before hindsight has the chance to alter them too much! Some of them are things I wish I’d known or realised beforehand, others are just little things that have worked well for us, but hopefully they might be useful for others at a similar stage and I’d be interested to hear how they compare to your own.
The first chunk are my notes from finding land through to gaining planning permission…
- There’s no doubt luck is required to find a good plot, but you can give yourself the best chance to be lucky. Research planning applications, look for areas of land on Google Earth, use Land Registry, write letters. Don’t just wait for Rightmove.
- We paid a lot of money for a site without planning permission – many people told us we were breaking the biggest self-build golden rule. We were clear with ourselves about the risk we were taking, understood exactly why the current owners didn’t want to put planning in place and, importantly, we made sure the price we paid reflected the risk.
- Neighbourly relations are hugely important and you likely need to be prepared for people to object to your development no matter what you design. Disruption, noise, loss of green space, loss of privacy, and just change in general are all very real worries for people. We wrote letters to everyone in the immediate area outlining our plans and kept them up-to-date with our progress. We worked really hard to always be polite and courteous, even when we weren’t always getting that in return. We can now happily meet any neighbour know we’ve always done our best.
- Everything takes longer than you think! During the design process the weeks seemed to tick by very quickly – every iteration needed our architect to re-work something, and then come back to us a week or two later.
- Be open to your architects ideas and suggestions, think things through and question your own presumptions, but also don’t be afraid to push the design in the direction you think best.
- Our plot is in a conservation area so our plans were always going to come under a lot of scrutiny. Read up on planning applications in your local area and follow the applications as they progress, in particular read the statutory consultees responses (highways, trees, conservation). You can learn a lot by seeing what amendments or information they’re requesting and how that might translate to your own application.
- We used our local authority’s planning pre-application advice services with a fairly mature set of plans. This cost as much as a full planning application, and took longer, but was invaluable for letting us get feedback from the conservation/planning officer away from any neighbour scrutiny.
- We’d agreed at the start a fixed price with our architect through to full planning submission, this proved very worthwhile as significant re-design was needed on the basis of the pre-app feedback.
- We listened to our neighbour objections, and tried to mitigate their concerns where practical, but at the end of the day we knew we’d be submitting plans with things they wouldn’t like. We made sure we explained the rationale for why alternates weren’t possible, but otherwise pushed ahead with the design we wanted that stood us in the best stead for planning.
- Despite all our neighbourly relation work our application attracted objections (as expected!) but went through smoothly as we’d addressed all the material considerations from our pre-app. Importantly we remained on good terms.
- If the shoe’s on the other foot - and you’re objecting to a neighbouring application - make sure you focus on the material considerations. One neighbour picked up on the aspect of our design we were least confident would get through but then buried their remarks on it in the middle of long-winded list of other non-material objections. Had they clearly presented their case and focussed on the material considerations they likely stood a much better chance of influencing the planning officer.
Edited by BadgerBadger
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