The conservation officer withdrew the objection on three grounds: the foundations of the old range were still visible, the room was divided inside along the old lines, and there was more glass. The council's report found the glazing had become "a more dominant feature" than in the first design.
The full story
The house is listed Grade II: a timber-framed front of about the 17th century with largely early 19th-century additions behind, divided into three homes after 1954. On its garden side stood a single-storey brick room with a flat roof and a white lean-to conservatory approved in 2000.
The owners shaped the brief. They wanted one masonry room across the back of the house, and brought us a survey of the house drawn in 1954, before it was divided. It showed a longer single-storey range on that side, of fuel stores, two WCs and a store, and they wanted the new room to follow its line.
On a listed house an orangery needs listed building consent as well as planning permission, so both applications went in together in October 2022. The first design ran one orangery across the garden side on the line of that old range: five arched brick openings under stone heads and a flat roof with three lanterns.
The conservation officer objected that it was too deep and too heavy for the historic core of the house, and the planning officer advised that there were grounds for refusal. Our case, the footprint of the range on the 1954 survey, did not persuade on its own.
We asked for a meeting at the house. At that site meeting, in December 2022, the conservation officer asked for a lighter building with more glass, and a room divided inside along the lines of the old range. Four days later we had sketched the answer: masonry piers on the existing lines of structure, folding doors inside to break up the space, and a carved timber cornice where the first design had stone.
We redrew the front as five pairs of glazed doors with Gothic tracery in the top lights, under a lower parapet. The tracery was the owners' idea: they sent us a sketch of it, to match the house's ground-floor windows.
When a pitched roof was suggested to shed rain, we kept the flat roof with a gentle fall instead, so that a blind window in the old wall above it, one of the conservation officer's first concerns, stayed in view.
The owners chose to show the new drawings in person, at a second meeting at the house with the conservation officer in January 2023. Ten days later the objection was withdrawn on three grounds: the old range's foundations were still visible, the room was divided along the old lines, and there was more glass. Both consents were granted on 8 February 2023.
After consent, a check on site found the stone corbels that support an old chimney stack in the way of the end pier. We redrew the roof in glass: one patent-glazed roof in place of the flat roof and three lanterns, clear of the old detail, so the corbels were left whole and the blind window better seen.
The conservation officer supported the glazed roof before we applied for it. The change was approved by amendment to the planning permission in August 2023 and by a new listed building consent in January 2024.
Building control approved reusing the Victorian footings in April 2023, so the orangery needed no new foundations. The materials, approved in March 2024, were bricks matched to the house and laid in Flemish bond, a lime mortar matched to the original, sandstone sills and cast-iron rainwater goods. The council's building control register records the work as completed in September 2025.
