A private gym, indoor pool, sauna and spa for a world-class athlete, at home.
The completed wing: local stone and a dark pitched roof to match the house, with a tall window opening the pool to the garden. A visualisation of the finished building, not a photograph. Built and occupied in 2005. Client and exact location anonymised by agreement.
Larger than the planners would carry.
The first scheme, in the autumn of 2003, asked more of a protected landscape than the policy of the day would give. So we asked the officer what would be supported, and redesigned to the answer rather than arguing with it.
Discuss a countryside site
The redesigned scheme went to a recommendation for approval, and full planning permission for a new building in open countryside followed in the spring of 2004. Construction started that September and the wing was occupied in 2005. The courtyard above is a visualisation of the completed building, not a photograph.
Putting up a new building in open countryside is never straightforward, even when the case is a good one. The local plan in force at the time resisted development in the rural landscape, and this house had already been extended twice. Every square metre of new building had to earn its place.
The first application, submitted in October 2003, was larger than the planners would support. That is a common point for a private scheme to stall: the client has a brief, the site has a policy, and the two do not meet. A meeting with the case officer before Christmas set out precisely what was, and was not, acceptable.
We took that as the brief rather than as a setback, and went back to the drawing board. Four moves did the work. The overall scale came down significantly. A hip was introduced to the rear roofline so the mass fell away from the open landscape. The new building was detached from the existing house, so it read as an outbuilding rather than a wing bolted on. And the footprint was locked to the ground the dilapidated outbuildings already occupied, so nothing spread further into the countryside.
The case was then reframed around an established principle of the day: that a replacement building in the countryside can be supported where it is a clear design improvement on what it removes. Against a run of failing timber sheds, that argument was not hard to make once the building itself had been brought down to a size the landscape could take.
The brief carried its own technical weight alongside the planning one. A professional gym needs specialist equipment and careful spatial planning from the outset. A serious indoor pool brings structural, drainage and ventilation demands that have to be designed in before a single stone is laid. Both were resolved on paper before the build could start, which is why the plant room revision was handled as a detail rather than a crisis.
One caveat, because the rulebook has moved a long way since. This scheme was decided under the planning framework as it stood in 2004, under a local plan long since replaced. National policy has been rewritten several times in the years since, most recently on 17 August 2026, when the Framework's paragraph numbers were replaced by policy codes. The argument that won here is a good illustration of how a countryside objection can be answered, but it is not the current policy test, and a site like this today would be assessed against a different set of words.
We took the brief, made the planning case through its required redesign, then administered the building contract on the owner's behalf through to practical completion.
Director-led and discreet throughout: one point of accountability from the first conversation to the last snagging item.
Full planning permission for a new building in open countryside, granted spring 2004 on the redesign.
Caught early, the plant room revision never reached the client as a crisis. That is most of what contract administration is for.
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