Rural Housing Development

A new rural community of 29 homes has been approved following a planning appeal at a Green Belt and Conservation Area site in Oxted, Surrey when the Appeal Inspector decided that the outstanding design should be given significant weight in favour of approval.

The site contains redundant agricultural sheds on the edge of a village overlooking open fields. They are not considered previously developed land and so the development of new homes was deemed inappropriate development within the Green Belt. The proposal is to replace the sheds with a new community living in a mix of family houses, older person housing and affordable housing surrounded by high quality landscaping and open space.

The architectural design strategy was to locate the new homes entirely within the footprint and volume of the existing sheds but to reduce the built footprint and volume by half to increase the openness of the Green Belt. The new massing is based on the distinctive characteristics of the location and influenced by some of the aspects of the existing buildings. The scheme inventively intertwines within the landscape a series of bespoke designed dwellings, including terraces, that often echo the proportions and profiles of agricultural buildings. The design seeks to subtly minimise the domestic appearance of the buildings, and the layout takes care to reduce the dominance, as far as possible, of vehicle parking and the related visual influence on street scenes. The mass of buildings would be broken up with views through and within the site, and the layout provides links with the open spaces and landscaped corridors.

The scheme was refused planning permission in early 2024. The client appealed this decision bringing onto the team further consultants including a Heritage expert witness Cogent Heritage and architectural quality expert witness Paul Finch.

The Appeal Inspector decided in May 2025 that ‘the scheme should be considered an outstanding design that fits within the overall form and layout of its surroundings, and would raise the standard of design more generally in the area, [and] I therefore attach the architectural quality of the scheme significant weight in favour of approval.’

Other features of the design that were given significant weight in the planning balance were; the housing mix which included both affordable and active elderly housing on site, the 80% increase in biodiversity and the very generous open space to be provided as part of the scheme.