Charles Holland Architects has won planning for a new house in the Kent Downs Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty after a planning inspector praised its “outstanding and innovative” design.

The property will be built close to a grade II*-listed manor house near Dover and was approved under so-called “paragraph 79” rules in the National Planning Policy Framework. Also known as the country-house clause, paragraph 79 allows new buildings to be constructed in protected areas of the countryside if their design is exceptional.

Holland’s 170sq m house is described by the architect as a “mannerist inversion” of the proposed building’s 17^th-century neighbour, with a front elevation characterised by an exaggerated catslide roof of peg tiles that reaches almost to the ground.

…