A country cottage, off the peg

Anne Spackman reports on a campaign for more imaginative design and local variety in rural housing

In a new report on the design of rural housing, the Council for the Protection of Rural England exhorts everyone involved to ensure new homes are built in a more pleasing, vernacular style. The Government, local councils, builders, professionals and local communities are each given their own set of dos and don'ts. But nowhere does it mention the customers. If people did not buy the bland boxes against which the council so rightly rails, no one would build them. And indeed, that is starting to be the case.

What little recovery there has been over the past two years has been at the quality end of the market. Builders have learnt that they can only tempt buyers by offering them something special and that desirability commands a premium. The British car industry learnt the same lesson from the success of well-designed but expensive German marques.

Many of the ugly housing developments pictured in the council's report were built during the Seventies and Eighties. No builder today would put up flat-fronted houses such as those shown at Apperley Park in Gloucestershire - not on aesthetic grounds, but because they would not sell. The recession has probably done more for good housing design than any number of planning policy guidance notes from the Department of the Environment.

But there are still plenty of houses going up across the country which support the CPRE's lament that uniformity is triumphing over distinctiveness, and suburbia over all. Travelling to Oxford last week, the train passed a housing estate on the edge of Didcot where a Bryant flag was flying over a set of uninspiring new boxes. The only compensation is that they were an extension of a large suburban estate, rather than new brick homes plonked in a pretty stone village.

But some builders have seen the light. Charles Church was one of the first to use traditional brick and flint in Sussex and Hampshire houses, for which the company rightly won awards. One of the most successful builders to take up this philosophy was Berkeley Homes, whose weatherboarded cottages in Kent are very different from its thatches in the New Forest.

But on the whole it is the smaller developers who have most readily grasped the potential for building homes in keeping with the local environment. With the supply of land in popular country locations drying up, the best sites available for new housing are often very small. If developers are to get their money back, they must put something good on them. Distinctiveness is fighting back.

One of the best examples of a builder going for quality, traditionally designed homes is in the village of Great Wolford on the Warwickshire- Gloucestershire border. Here two brothers, Martin and Ivor Johnson, are building Carters Leaze, a small development of terraced cottages in farmstead clusters. In terms of the lay-out of the site, the materials used and the individual designs of each house, Carters Leaze follows many of the guidelines laid down in the CPRE report.

The cottages are all built of local Cotswold stone, much of it reclaimed from redundant buildings. By using a variety of sources, the Johnson brothers have avoided the uniformity which so commonly spoils rural schemes. The size and shapes of the stones, the windows, doors and gables vary from house to house, but all are in keeping with Cotswold tradition. The floor tiles in one kitchen come from a disused church, the stone mullions used for many windows are old; even the Agas in the larger houses are reconditioned.

The site is mercifully free of the concrete paving stones which the CPRE report condemns, having front gardens edged in stone sets and dry stone wall boundaries. The local authority's strict parking requirements for more than one space per property, which the CPRE highlights as a potential design obstacle, were partly dealt with by the clever conversion of an old cow-shed into garaging for four cars.

Another great obstacle faced by rural developers is nimby-ism ("not in my back yard"), which the CPRE report defends as reasonable. Carters Leaze avoided that problem in Great Wolford as it built in the back yard of developer Ivor Johnson.

The CPRE report is a plea for rural developers to respect the natural and built environment they are working in and to use local materials and styles wherever possible. But many of its principles apply equally to cities. The Docklands area of London has become home to a hundred variations on a theme of the modern box rather than a district which takes its lead from its watery landscape and maritime past.

But the creativity is returning. Landworth Heritage Limited has painstakingly restored a 17th-century charity school in the conservation area of Wapping and converted it to a terrace of four elegant houses. It has retained or copied much of the old panelling - including some ancient graffiti - wooden cornices, skirtings, architraves and shutters. It has restored the swags marked "Boys" and "Infants" and the figures of a uniformed boy and girl that decorate the arches over the front doors.

A similar attention to detail applies inside. The kitchen cupboards repeat the pattern on the front shutters, there are cast- iron roll-top baths and the ironmongery is the colour of burnished pewter. The predominantly Shaker blue paintwork gives a sense of the riverside a hundred yards away.

New housing has long been associated with bad housing in Britain. But schemes such as these could change buyers' perceptions. They will appeal to the kind of people who assumed they would have to spend a lot of time and money getting their country cottage or city terrace just right. Here they get the finished product off the peg - not to mention a welcome, rather than black looks, from the neighbours.

Local Attraction costs pounds 4.99 including p&p from CPRE Publications, 25 Buckingham Palace Road, London SW1W 0PP (0171-976 6433). Prices for cottages at Carters Leaze go from pounds 120,000 for a three-bedroom terrace to pounds 225,000 for a four-bedroom, three-bathroom detached; contact Knight Frank & Rutley in Oxford (01865 790077). Four- and five-bedroom houses in St John's Old School in Wapping cost from pounds 375,000 to pounds 495,000, including parking, from Savills' Docklands office (0171-488 9586).