Expert tips on ‘Grand Designing’ your way to rural living

A home in the countryside is the dream of many, with more open space and a slower pace of life among the aspirations of those longing to live there. It’s a dream, however, that can be tough to realise.

Affordability is a major problem in rural housing. North Yorkshire, for example, is one of the least affordable areas for housing outside the South of England.

In some areas of the region, residents would need to pay up to ten times their annual salary to afford a home and rental properties are scarce due to second homes and holiday lets. This leaves many priced out of rural living.

Aside affordability, planning is the other main issue that affects the supply of rural homes, and an urban centric planning policy and stricter development controls means that far fewer homes are built in rural areas.

With almost 40 per cent of Yorkshire designated as either a National Park or National Landscape where restrictions are even greater, it’s not hard to see how demand outstrips supply.

For those with the vision, determination, and resources however,self-build may be a viable route to that rural living dream. Self-build refers to building your own home, to your own design specification.

This includes new-build homes, as well as conversion of existing buildings. The latter having become somewhat easier in rural areas with ‘permitted development’ rights allowing the conversion of former agricultural buildings into rural dwellings in certain circumstances.

At one end of the spectrum, self-build can be an affordable way to a country home with savvy schemes, often on infill sites, i.e. pockets of undeveloped land within settlements, typically saving

20 to 40 per cent compared to investing in a comparable new home.

Attheotherendare‘granddesign’ country homes – usually on a larger scale and situated in open countryside. Whilst often more desirable, homes on such sites are far harder to achieve with planning policy restricting such development in all but exceptional circumstances.

There is however a means to achieve this through the so-called ‘country house clause’ introduced to national planning policy in 1995.

Initially introduced to enable the continuation of the traditional English country house, by allowing new ‘stately homes’ to be built in the countryside, Paragraph 84e of the National Planning Policy Framework presents the opportunity to build on isolated sites that sit away from existing settlements.

Proposed homes must demonstrate exceptional quality with the bar for architectural and landscape merit set extremely high. Replacing an existing country home is a possibility, but againdesign merit is key. Such homes do not need to be grand in scale but do need to demonstrate the highest standards in architecture.

Whilst becoming trickier to achieve, around 20 such country homes have been approved in Yorkshire with several more proposed, so if a home with true architectural merit is something that appeals, it may well be the route to building the country life.