'The Clearing'

Four executive homes in the Nottinghamshire green belt.

2026

Commercial Residential

Green belt villages have strong opinions about new houses. Strong, vocal, turn-up-to-the-committee-meeting opinions.

Overview

Underwood is a green belt village with plenty of opinions about new houses. And it has neighbours who will turn up to a planning committee and share those opinions at some length.

The brief, then, was simple enough: design four homes that look like they belong. That read as part of the village. That don't poke the bear.

And then make them the best homes on the street.

That combination — contextually sensitive, quietly exceptional — is a design problem worth solving. Which is fortunate, because it took three committee hearings to get outline permission, and nobody wanted to go back for a fourth.

Location

Nottinghamshire

Status

Planning Approved

Client

Boxton Homes

Services

Architectural Design

3D Visualisation

Planning

Area

4nr 2,500sqft Homes

It's All Uphill From Here

The plot slopes. Front to back it rises quite noticeably, and rather than flatten it out, we worked around it.

Every floorplan is split-level — ground floor and first floor both step with the topography. The front gardens tier upward to meet the building entrances, with parking sitting lower and the houses above. You approach them rather than just arrive at them, which works well for homes of this type.

The rear and sides are enclosed by dense woodland, which gives each plot privacy and a sense of depth that open sites rarely have. It also came with ecological obligations — surveys, conditions, a landscape strategy built around the treeline. Those constraints shaped the scheme in ways that ultimately helped it.

A private gated access road serves all four plots from the public highway. The whole thing reads as a single address rather than four separate houses dropped on a shared driveway.

Same Street. Different League.

Pitched roofs, brick, gables, dormers. The vocabulary of English villages. And then: grey brick, zinc, oversized chimneys, and glass that runs to the floor.

The homes are rooted in the local vernacular — pitched roofs, red brick, stone corbels, bay windows, gables, dormers. Nothing about the surrounding area is architecturally special, but it still sets the tone for what fits and what doesn't. Working within that language made planning sense and design sense.

That said, these aren't reproductions of anything. Alongside the traditional forms sit oriel windows, gable windows, oversized chimneys, and zinc standing seam cladding to the single-storey rear elements. The palette is darker and more considered than you'd typically find in this part of Nottinghamshire — grey brick, rich tones, integrated fire pits, large glazed doors opening onto the gardens.

Inside: open plan living, double-sided fireplaces, integral garages. The split levels that the topography required add a spatial quality that flat-plan homes tend to lack. Four or five bedrooms per plot. Four plots.

The Painful Planning

The outline permission took three committee hearings and a laborious green belt argument, the eventual approval. What matters now is the reserved matters stage.

Twenty planning conditions need satisfying before construction starts. Reserved matters covers appearance, landscaping, layout, scale, and access. On top of that there's pre-commencement conditions — ecology, drainage, geotechnics, highways — each requiring specialist input and each on a programme.

We're managing the full package: the design, the consultant team, the submissions, and the ongoing dialogue with Ashfield District Council. Geotechnical engineers, ecologists, structural engineers, highways designers, landscape architects, and surveyors — all coordinated through one point of contact for Boxton Homes.

Do you have a site like this?

If you're sitting on land with development potential — green belt, backland, a plot with complications — we're worth a conversation. We've secured outline permission on sites most people walked away from. We know what the planning argument needs to look like, and we know how to design something that proves it.

Parkside Green

RESIDENTIAL DEVELOPMENT

Hilltop Farm

Private Residential

Ready To Talk?

How it works (Because "get in touch" shouldn't feel like a leap of faith)

01. Talk One conversation to understand your project, your budget, and whether we're the right fit. No obligation. No sales pitch.

02. Design Everything built around your brief. We sketch, develop, and refine — with check-ins before anything is fixed. You stay in control without getting buried in the detail.

03. Deliver Through planning, building regs, and into construction. We handle the process. You make the decisions that matter.

Get in touch today