A dated house on the edge of Rugby, turned to face its own valley.
Visualisation of the consented design. The house is under construction.
A private client's single-storey side and rear extension with a full internal remodel, taken from first sketch to technical design through a householder application.
The ecology condition was discharged 23 days ahead of the council's own target date.
The owners came to us with a house they meant to keep for good, and a clear ambition: turn a dated, compartmented dwelling on the edge of Rugby into a modern family home that made the most of an unusual asset, open views across the valley from the back of the plot.
Their brief was specific about restraint. They wanted something modern but not too contemporary, a design that would sit comfortably with the existing house rather than compete with it. Not a new build and not a replacement dwelling: an existing home reworked to live better and open up to its setting.
The planning milestones, from the first bat assessment to consent and conditions discharged.
A dated brick house with conservatories, reworked into a single calm move that faces the owners' own land rather than the neighbours.
A compartmented plan, two conservatories, and a rear elevation that turned its back on the best view on the plot.
The dated rear elevation gives way to a low glazed extension running the width of the garden front. Visualisation of the consented design.
The rear vehicle access, closed off by the earliest concept, is kept clear in the consented layout.
An internal courtyard brings daylight into the middle of what had been a long, narrow plan.
A bat roost in the roof. An objection to the windows.
Either could have cost a refusal and a resubmission. Surveys confirmed a brown long-eared bat using the roof, so the work could not lawfully proceed without a Natural England licence. The officer then objected to the replacement front windows. Both were resolved inside the same application, and consent was granted in December 2024.
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Three fixed constraints on one plot: a protected species in the roof, a close boundary with the nearest neighbour, and the only vehicle access to the rear running down one side of the house.
Two things made this more than a routine extension. The first was the setting. The plot sits in a countryside location on the edge of town, alongside a small group of neighbouring homes, with the only vehicle access to the rear running down one side. The earliest concept opened up the rear beautifully but closed off that access, and the owners caught it straight away. A close boundary with the nearest neighbour also limited how far any rear element could project. The design had to reach for the view without overstepping the plot's real limits.
The second was a protected species. An initial roost assessment of the existing house found a high likelihood of bats, which triggered a full sequence of nocturnal emergence surveys. Those confirmed a brown long-eared bat using the roof as an occasional roost. From that point the work could not lawfully proceed without a European Protected Species Licence from Natural England, and the planning application had to carry a mitigation scheme the county ecologist would accept.
The planning officer supported the scheme in principle: the countryside location, the extension design and the cladding to the subservient elements were all judged acceptable. The objection was to the proposed replacement windows on the front elevation, felt to be out of keeping with the house and its neighbours. Rather than dig in, we treated it as a design conversation. Over three rounds of revised sketches we brought the window proportions back closer to the originals, matched the existing pane pattern, added brick soldier-course detailing, and moved to a black aluminium frame that picked up on a neighbouring property. The objection fell away.
We led the project from the first concept sketches to a fully detailed, consented design, and ran the ecology process end to end.
South-facing glazing was shaded to manage solar gain. The cladding was chosen to avoid the upkeep of real timber.
We commissioned the surveys, coordinated the mitigation scheme with the county ecologist, and steered the licence down the faster route the owners chose to save time.
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A Senior Architect will reply. We will give you an initial appraisal and guide you as to what to do next.