_Searching for a perfect country home? Building it yourself could be the answer
Everyone loves a period property. The character, the architectural style, the classic features… they all give you a warm, homely feeling as you walk up to your front door.
What doesn’t give you such a warm, homely feeling, however, are the draughty rooms, the low ceilings, the leaky windows, and the outdated wiring. Which is why, in the search for their perfect country property, more and more home-buyers are eschewing refurbishment and opting for a completely new-build home instead.
Above: Main entrance to Cadogan House in Wentworth, Surrey. The 5-9 bedroom house is available through Knight Frank
James Carter-Brown is an expert on rural new-build homes. Head of residential building consultancy at Knight Frank, he has overseen the construction of some of the most beautiful new properties across England’s shires. He explains that, however diligently you search through the existing housing stock, you’ll never find the perfect home.
“We’ve changed the way we live now,” he says. “Older housing stock is never going to be exactly what you want. The configuration of the kitchen and bathrooms, the big, open-plan family rooms, the heating systems, the lighting… if you want this to be perfect, you need to build it from scratch.”
He explains how, in previous centuries, rooms were very much compartmentalised. Open-plan living was unthinkable, partly because large rooms were difficult to heat, and partly because food was always prepared behind closed doors.
“In recent years we’ve had this push for open-plan living. Cooking is trendy. We cook in front of our guests, standing at the kitchen island. It’s a complete U-turn.”
When it comes to heating and lighting, new-build homes are far more efficient. Carter- Brown points to automated under-floor heating, air conditioning and lighting, all of which would be a logistical and costly nightmare to retro-fit into a Jacobean farmhouse, for example.
Above: Queen Anne House in Eaton Park. The 6 bedroom house is available through Knight Frank
For home-buyers at the higher end of the market, this is just the start. Carter-Brown recently worked on an 80,000 square-foot new-build property in the Thames Valley where the client pulled out every stop possible.
“He had an exhibition space built for a number of exquisite cars,” he says. “1960s Ferraris, that sort of thing; the very best of the best. Then there was the private collection of art. After that there was the indoor swimming pool, steam room and sauna. Also an indoor tennis court and squash court. It was really unusual.”
In the course of his work on new-builds, Carter-Brown has witnessed some truly eyebrow-raising designs: party spaces with dance-floors and state-of-the-art sound systems; a greenhouse with its own under-floor heating system; car ports with photovoltaic roofs and Tesla charging points; even a helicopter hangar.
But the most surprising of all was a chicken coop flanked by Corinthian columns. “It was basically a miniature Buckingham Palace for the chickens.”
Above: The indoor pool at Cadogan
Follies notwithstanding, new-build properties often make more financial sense than refurbishment of existing homes. Buy a huge Georgian farmhouse and the stamp duty will likely make your eyes bleed.
Opt instead for a small bungalow which you plan to demolish and replace, and you’ll save yourself a lot of tax in the process.
A more important consideration is VAT. As Carter-Brown explains: “If you’re buying a plot of land and building a new property on it, the construction costs of the house are VAT-exempt.” But he advises buyers to take specialist advice on this since it’s a complicated area.
Often, the price difference between refurbishing a period property and building a completely new one can be negligible, especially if you’re installing ambitious features and leisure facilities.
In fact, digging a basement beneath a Tudor farmhouse to accommodate the swimming pool and garage for the classic cars will be significantly more expensive than incorporating the same facilities into a new build.
Carter-Brown cites the example of a house construction he recently oversaw in the Hertfordshire town of Tring. On the site there had been a 1970s house which they knocked down, replacing it with “a really impressive home with a sedum roof, clever shading, a ground-source heating system, and glass walls on two sides, with views across the surrounding countryside”.
“It wasn’t worth it financially to do a refurb,” he adds. “The buyer would have spent loads of money knocking the structure around to achieve a property with only 80 per cent satisfaction. In the end, the whole construction cost, including fit-out, was slightly trimmer than the refurb would have been. And they got exactly what they wanted. When you’re procuring a new-build house, you always have more cost certainty.”
Of course budgets for new-build homes vary enormously depending on the location and the specification. Asked for some ballpark figures, Carter-Brown uses the example of land prices in West Berkshire, at the very western edge of the Home Counties.
Here, he knows of several parcels of land with planning consent agreed so that the existing property could be demolished and replaced with “an executive home”. For an acre of land he would expect buyers to pay between £700,000 and £1million. On top of that they are looking at house construction costs of £2,500 to £3,000 per square metre.
“For your home you might want 600 square metres which, at the top end, could therefore cost £1.8million in construction,” he adds.
He stresses how, counter-intuitive as it sounds, building your own property can actually require less time than converting an existing one. “Most definitely, if we don’t count the planning and procurement time,” he says.
“Working with an existing structure, there’s always the fear of the unknown. There are things you can’t know until you start taking it to pieces. So you need a contingency plan to deal with building defects, timber attack, insect attack, wet or dry rot... If you’re looking at a 10,000 square-foot house, by the time you’ve done all the work, and perhaps replaced the roof, time-wise, it’s a closely run race with a new build.”
But can a new-build home ever compete with a period property in charm and style? It’s back to that warm, homely feeling you want as you walk up to the front door of your home. Can a new-build ever give you that?
Fortunately the UK’s planning laws are so strict that the majority of rural new-builds have to conform to the architectural style of the villages surrounding them. “Yes, the inside of the property may be a blank canvas for any buyer,” Carter-Brown says, “but the exterior must be in keeping with the local style, materials and quality of design and construction.”
Which is why, fortunately, you don’t see angular post-modern new-builds dotted around Cotswold villages. There would be nothing warm and homely about that.
Even when new-builds do clash architecturally with the existing housing stock, that doesn’t mean they will forever remain unloved. Every new generation of architecture eventually finds its fans.
“Time never stands still,” says Carter-Brown. “In a hundred years, that property might well be the next heritage style. If you use a well-known and good-quality design team, aren’t you just building a future classic?”