Builders in East Horsley

East Horsley is unusual, and the reason is a decision made over a century ago. When the 3rd Earl of Lovelace sold off the former estate fields in the early 1900s he attached restrictive covenants to the land. The effect was that almost everything built afterwards was detached. By the 2011 census 1,309 of the village's 1,697 households were detached houses, which is a far higher share than anywhere else we work.

So the typical job here is a substantial detached house on a large, well screened plot, often set well back from the road behind trees. There is space to build, space to store materials and no shared wall to worry about, which removes a whole category of problems. The Daily Telegraph named East Horsley Britain's richest village in both 2011 and 2015, and the standard of finish people expect reflects that.

The village also has real architectural heritage. Horsley Towers is a Gothic Revival mansion designed by Sir Charles Barry, who went on to design the Houses of Parliament, built around 1828 for William Currie and later home to Ada, Lady Lovelace. The 1st Earl built fifteen distinctive bridges across the estate, the Lovelace Bridges, of which ten still stand. The estate buildings left a local language of flint and brick that later houses in the village often echo.

The practical consequence is that East Horsley properties are rarely a simple extension job. They are more often a large rear extension, a substantial remodel, an annexe or garden building, or a full replacement dwelling.

Clients here are often surprised that the approvals take longer than the build. It is worth understanding why, because it changes how you plan the year.

Three things stack up in this village. A conservation area covering the historic core, which removes some permitted development rights and brings materials and appearance into scope. A lot of protected trees, which need notice to the council before any work and can force a redesign of foundations. And green belt across much of the surrounding land, which limits new building and caps how much bigger a replacement house can be.

Any one of those is manageable. Together they mean a scheme that would be waved through in a suburb needs a proper application, often with a tree survey and sometimes an ecology report, and then a further stage to discharge the conditions attached to the permission before anyone can dig.

The way to deal with it is to front load it. We look at the constraints on your address at the first visit, before drawings, so the design starts from what is achievable. That is far cheaper than designing something beautiful and then discovering a protected oak sits exactly where the foundations need to go.