Building in Protected Landscapes

Designing homes that belong in protected landscapes

Most of my last ten years in practice have been spent designing homes in protected landscapes: Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty, conservation areas, a World Heritage Site, National Parks. These experiences have shaped my design process. Designing homes on sensitive sites is a privilege, but it is also a skill, one that involves looking closely and working gently with the land.

A greater level of care

Landscape designations carry additional planning restrictions that can make it harder to secure permission. But this doesn't mean sacrificing good design, more often, it's the reason good design emerges at all.

Rather than a barrier, protected landscapes ask for something more specific.

A deeper understanding of the setting. A clearer design response. And a greater level of care in how a building is composed, sited and detailed.

Cornwall has an extensive protected landscape, from the Cornwall National Landscape (formerly the Cornwall AONB), which covers much of the county's most distinctive coastline and moorland, to the conservation areas that surround some of our most historic townscapes. Each has its own sensitivities, its own planning framework, and its own way of testing whether a design truly belongs.

The landscape comes first

In protected settings, design begins with observation rather than assumption.

Topography, light, exposure and views all shape how a building can sit. Some sites offer long outward views across open moorland or coast. Others are enclosed by trees or valleys. Some are exposed to the full force of Atlantic weather. Others are sheltered and intimate.

These conditions form the foundation of the design, not obstacles to work around.

A building that belongs in its landscape is not imposed onto it. It is shaped by it.

How a building sits

Simple, legible forms tend to read more clearly in open or rural settings than complex or fragmented ones. Their relationship to the ground, particularly on sloping sites, helps anchor them within the landscape.

Where a larger home is required, mass can be reduced by breaking the building into a series of smaller volumes, a response that reflects the way traditional Cornish farmsteads are arranged, with separate elements sitting together rather than merging into a single dominant form.

The aim isn't to replicate historic buildings, but to understand how buildings of a place are composed, and to respond in a way that feels natural within that context.

Valley House is in the Cornwall National Landscape. Its form is composed of two traditional house-shaped volumes, each aligned to the contours: the taller one backed against the wooded valley, the smaller one in front, to manage the overall mass and scale of the home.

VAlley House is delivered in Collaboration with KAST Architects

Settling in

Light is one of the most sensitive considerations in darker rural settings. Openings are carefully proportioned. Glazing is often sheltered within the depth of a wall or beneath an overhanging roof, controlling glare, managing solar gain and limiting light spill at night.

Materials play an equally important role. Darker, more recessive tones tend to sit quietly. Natural materials such as timber, stone and slate weather over time, softening their appearance and allowing buildings to settle into their surroundings rather than standing apart from them.

Plinth House sits on the edge of a conservation area within the National Landscape, and was designed not to break the skyline. It replaced a white-rendered bungalow with a dominant red-tiled roof, with a darker, slate-clad form that dissolves into the landscape when viewed from the water.

Plinth House was designed while at KAST Architects.

A considered approach

Designing in protected landscapes requires restraint, but also confidence.

It is not a question of meeting a checklist of requirements. It is about making decisions that are appropriate to the place, decisions that consider how a building is seen, how it performs over time, and how it will be experienced by the people who live in it.

This way of working has shaped projects across the Cornwall National Landscape, Exmoor National Park and a number of conservation areas. It sits at the heart of how we approach every site in a sensitive or protected setting.

The best projects in these landscapes aren't the ones that announce themselves. They are the ones that sit quietly within their setting, and feel as though they have always been there.

If you’d like to talk through your own project, feel free to get in touch.

Written by David Jones, RIBA Chartered Architect and Passive House Designer, based in Cornwall.