A care-village consent, turned into 25 homes now on site.
Visualisation of the consented scheme, seen across the meadow. The homes are under construction.
BoBen Construction's redevelopment of the former Inwoods House site on Ashlawn Road: one full application, granted at committee, now being built.
The consent carries 37 conditions and a Section 106 agreement.
BoBen Construction had bought the former Inwoods House site on the southern edge of Rugby, with an extant consent for a Use Class C2 retirement village already on the land. That consent was part of the site's value: it established the principle of development on previously developed land, and stood behind the purchase as a fallback. It just was not the open-market homes BoBen wanted to build. The southern end was designated Green Infrastructure the council wanted kept open.
The job was to carry that established principle across to a different use: a deliverable scheme of houses that people would pay for, on a site with a protected green corridor. That is what they brought us in to do.
Rickett Architects accommodation schedule, job 3343.
The milestones, from pre-application advice to full permission and the start on site.
Gabled forms with full-height gable glazing, standing-seam zinc roofs, timber cladding and brick plinths, set behind the retained trees on Ashlawn Road. The first of them are now standing.
Detached houses behind planted verges, the gardens running back to the retained trees. Visualisation of the consented scheme, by Picaro Studio.
Photographed in June 2026: the VMZinc standing-seam roof, Millboard cladding and Vandersanden brick, approved under condition 3, built as drawn.
The consented layout. The Green Infrastructure corridor stays open where the site narrows south-east.
Planting runs between the homes, and the houses are set to look south over the open countryside. Visualisation of the consented scheme.
Kerbed, surfaced and drained by June 2025. The attenuation pond, the swales and the two new accesses all went in ahead of the frames.
Indicative schematic. The boundary is traced from the consented site plan; pre-existing constraints only.
A typical house type: open-plan living opening south to the garden, with an integral garage.
Consented for a care village. Bought for homes.
The care-village consent was an asset: it set the principle of development, fixed the corridor datum, and stood as a fallback. What it could not deliver was the homes BoBen bought the site for. Granted at committee, March 2024.
Discuss your site
Five fixed constraints on one site: the Green Infrastructure corridor at the southern end, an avenue of TPO limes through the middle, an active badger sett on the eastern boundary, arsenic and lead in made ground, and clay beneath it all, with a single watercourse ditch as the only outfall.
The site looked open, but almost every part of it was spoken for. The land had been Inwoods House, then a training centre, then offices, all since demolished, and the ground carried localised arsenic and lead in made ground that needed targeted remediation before homes could sit on it. The southern third had to stay open as the council's Green Infrastructure corridor. Across the middle ran an avenue of mature limes protected by a Tree Preservation Order, with beech hedges and protected oaks along the boundaries, and an active badger sett on the eastern edge that had to be kept and worked around.
The ground was as awkward below as above. Levels fall around eight metres from Ashlawn Road down to the south, where a single ordinary watercourse ditch was the only place surface water could go. Clay beneath the gravel ruled out soakaways, so every drop had to be held back and released slowly. On top of that sat the access: two new junctions onto Ashlawn Road under a Section 278 agreement, with the NCN41 cycleway to widen to three metres. For a developer none of that is abstract. Remediation, attenuation, tree protection and highway works are each a cost line and a programme risk, sitting between buying the land and selling the first home.
The layout answered the site rather than fighting it. The homes were set against what the land would take, with built form and gardens held inside the line the earlier care-village consent had established, so the council could see the green corridor was not being eroded. The drainage became part of the landscape: swales, an attenuation basin and a flow control device hold surface water back and release it below the greenfield rate, cascading through the existing pond into the southern ditch. One team ran planning, highways and drainage, ecology and arboriculture, ground investigation, transport and air quality into a single submission, and answered the planners' questions on mix, windows and drainage rather than letting them stall the application.
Architect and planning agent on the same scheme from concept to construction, and the drawings that fund and sell it.
Queries on the housing mix, the window treatments and the drainage were answered during determination rather than left to stall the application.
Clay rules out soakaways and the land falls around eight metres north to south. The drainage became landscape rather than a fight against it.
The part that never shows in a brochure, and the part that gets the scheme built without surprises on site.
A consent is the start of the job, not the end of it. The same team carries the scheme through funding, sales and construction.
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