Bespoke House Design in Richmond

Bespoke house design means designing a single, individual home from scratch for a specific client and a specific site, rather than adapting a standard house type. Every decision — the footprint, the orientation, the room layout, the roof form, the materials, the way light enters and the way the house sits among its neighbours and trees — is made for this plot and this household. The alternative, a volume house-builder's standard type, works on an open field where hundreds of identical units go up together. It does not work in Richmond, where almost every plot is unique, constrained and watched closely by the planning system.

A bespoke home in Richmond takes several forms. It might be a brand-new house on a rare genuinely vacant plot — an unusual thing in this densely built borough. More often it is a replacement dwelling: an existing house, frequently a tired post-war bungalow or an unremarkable inter-war house, demolished and rebuilt as something far better. It can be a backland or garden plot, where a new home is created behind or beside existing houses. And, on exceptional sites, it can be a genuinely contemporary design in a sensitive setting — a modern house that earns its place through the sheer quality of its architecture.

The people who commission bespoke houses in Richmond are, overwhelmingly, people who want to live in the borough long-term and cannot find — or do not want — what the second-hand market offers. They want a home that fits their family, works for how they actually live, meets today's standards for space, light and energy, and belongs to its street rather than fighting it. Some are downsizing from a large period house into a smaller, better-performing modern one; some are growing families rebuilding an inadequate house on a good plot; some are simply people who value good architecture and have found a site worth building on.

What unites them is that a bespoke house in this borough is never a quick or automatic thing. It is a design project and a planning project first, and a construction project second. The first job on any instruction is to understand the plot completely — its planning designations, its constraints, its potential — and to design a house that is both the home the client wants and a scheme Richmond upon Thames Council can approve. Everything that follows on this page is organised around that dual challenge: making a beautiful home that also wins permission.

The London Borough of Richmond upon Thames is the only London borough to straddle the Thames, and it is defined by that river and by an extraordinary concentration of green space and heritage. It was created in 1965 by amalgamating the former boroughs of Barnes and Richmond, east of the Thames and historically part of Surrey, with Twickenham, historically part of Middlesex. That merger of Surrey and Middlesex villages is still legible in the borough's character — a collection of distinct riverside settlements rather than a single town, each with its own centre, green and identity.

The borough's royal history runs deep. In the early sixteenth century Henry VII rebuilt the manor house in the district then known as Shene and renamed it Richmond, after his earldom in Yorkshire, giving the town its name. Richmond Park, the largest of London's Royal Parks at some 2,500 acres, was enclosed by Charles I in the seventeenth century as a deer park; it is now a National Nature Reserve, a Site of Special Scientific Interest and a Special Area of Conservation, and is registered at Grade I on Historic England's Register of Historic Parks and Gardens. The Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, which formally began in 1759, were inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2003 — a designation that casts a protective setting well beyond the garden walls.

Along the river, Ham House survives from around 1610 in a celebrated riverside landscape; Marble Hill, the Octagon Room at Orleans House, and the villas of Twickenham and Petersham recall the eighteenth-century vogue for building beside the Thames. Petersham itself was recorded in the Domesday Book in 1086. The famous view from Richmond Hill over the Thames meadows towards Petersham and Ham is the only view in England protected by its own Act of Parliament — the Richmond, Ham and Petersham Open Spaces Act 1902 — a fact that tells you everything about how seriously this borough protects what it has.

That inheritance produces the planning context every new house has to work within. The borough contains 87 conservation areas — one of the highest concentrations anywhere in the country — and around 815 listed buildings, including roughly 40 at Grade I and 88 at Grade II*. More than 54 per cent of the borough is designated as Green Belt or Metropolitan Open Land. Neighbourhoods from Kew Green and Barnes to Strawberry Hill, Ham Common, Richmond Green and the riverside at Twickenham are protected for their architectural, historic and landscape value. For a bespoke house this context is not background — it is the frame the design has to fit, and understanding which designations apply to your specific plot is the very first step.

Building a new dwelling is not permitted development. The permitted development rights that let householders add extensions, loft conversions and outbuildings to an existing house do not extend to building a whole new house — creating a new dwelling is precisely the kind of change the planning system exists to control. A bespoke new home in Richmond therefore requires full planning permission, submitted to Richmond upon Thames Council and judged against the whole of the borough's Local Plan and the London Plan. There is no shortcut and no prior-approval route for a genuinely new house.

This is true whether the plot is empty, the result of a demolition, or carved out of an existing garden. Even a replacement dwelling — knocking down one house and building another — needs full planning permission for the new house (and, separately, may need prior approval or a planning application for the demolition itself, depending on the site). A house in a backland or garden plot needs full permission and will be scrutinised for its impact on neighbours and on the character of the block. In no ordinary case can you build a new house in Richmond without a full planning application.

In many parts of Richmond a further consent runs alongside the planning application. If the plot is within the curtilage of a listed building, or the new house would affect the setting of one, listed building consent or careful heritage assessment comes into play. In a conservation area — which covers most of the borough — the council has a statutory duty to give special attention to preserving or enhancing the area's character or appearance, and demolition in a conservation area is itself controlled. On sites near Kew Gardens the World Heritage Site setting is a material consideration. Establishing exactly which consents your plot needs is part of the first feasibility stage.

The upside of the full planning route is that it is not a rigid checklist but a judgement on the merits — which means a genuinely excellent design can succeed even on a difficult site, and a poor design will fail even on an easy one. Unlike the tightly defined prior-approval regimes that govern some change-of-use projects, a full application lets you make a positive architectural case. In a borough that prizes design quality as highly as Richmond does, that is an opportunity as much as a hurdle: the better the house, the stronger the application.

A bespoke new home in Richmond is judged against the borough's Local Plan, which was adopted on 7 October 2025 and replaced the previous 2018 plan. The new plan sets out the council's priorities for housing, infrastructure and the environment for the next fifteen years, and it establishes a housing requirement of 5,928 dwellings for the period from 2024 to 2039, drawn from the London Plan targets and delivered on a stepped trajectory (set out in the plan's housing-supply policy) that expects higher delivery in later years. Knowing which policies apply lets us design and argue the scheme around them from the start.

Design quality sits at the heart of the plan. Richmond has long required all development to be of high architectural and urban design quality that respects and responds to local character — including the spaces between buildings, rooflines, materials, boundary treatments and the relationship to the street and to neighbours. This is not a preference the council can be talked out of; it is the central test almost every application turns on. A new house has to demonstrate, through its drawings and its design and access statement, that it genuinely responds to its context rather than ignoring it.

Alongside design, several thematic policies bear directly on a new home. The plan's amenity and living-conditions policy sets standards for the relationship between homes — including separation distances between habitable-room windows to protect privacy and outlook. Its biodiversity policy expects even small residential proposals to provide new habitat or biodiversity features, reflecting the national move to biodiversity net gain. Policies on the Thames and its character, on trees and landscape, on flood risk in the riverside floodplain, and on sustainable design all shape what can be built and how. The council also organises the borough into a set of distinct 'places', each with its own character, supported by Village Planning Guidance for the borough's villages — so the relevant local character is defined quite precisely for your site.

The practical consequence is that a Richmond new-home scheme is designed policy by policy as much as it is designed room by room. We identify the designations and policies that apply to your plot — conservation area, listed-building setting, Green Belt or MOL, flood zone, protected view, tree constraints — and shape the house so that each is answered in the design itself and in the supporting statements. That is how a bespoke home is made both an excellent house and a consentable one.

For most bespoke houses in Richmond, the single most important local fact is that the plot sits within one of the borough's 87 conservation areas. A conservation area is a place designated by the council for its special architectural or historic interest, whose character or appearance it is desirable to preserve or enhance. When it determines an application within one, the council has a statutory duty — under the Planning (Listed Buildings and Conservation Areas) Act 1990 — to pay special attention to the desirability of preserving or enhancing that character or appearance. That duty colours every judgement the case officer makes.

In practice this means a new house in a conservation area is assessed not just as a building in isolation but as an intervention in a valued place. The council will look at how the house relates to the established grain, scale, height, rhythm and building line of the area; at the materials and detailing and whether they are appropriate to the local palette; at the impact on important views into and out of the area; and at the effect of any demolition on the area's character. It is entirely possible to build a new house — even a boldly contemporary one — in a Richmond conservation area, but the design has to earn it by preserving or enhancing the place, not merely avoiding harm.

Conservation-area status also brings additional controls that shape the process. Demolition of a building in a conservation area is controlled and may itself require consent. Works to trees in a conservation area require notice to the council, and many mature trees are additionally protected by Tree Preservation Orders — a serious constraint in a leafy borough where trees are often the reason a site feels the way it does. Some conservation areas are covered by Article 4 Directions that remove permitted development rights, meaning even minor changes need permission; this matters for how the finished house can later be altered, and for any existing building on the plot.

Because the conservation-area duty is so central, we begin every conservation-area project with a proper reading of the area's character — drawing on the council's conservation area statement or appraisal for the specific area, which explains why and when it was designated and what makes it special. That reading drives the design: the house is conceived as a response to the place from the outset, so that the heritage case is built into the architecture rather than bolted on as a statement afterwards. In a borough of 87 conservation areas, this is not an occasional consideration — it is the normal starting point.

A large share of bespoke new homes in Richmond are replacement dwellings — an existing house is demolished and a new, better house is built in its place. This is often the most realistic way to get a genuinely new home in a borough with so few vacant plots, and it suits tired inter-war and post-war houses, undersized bungalows and unremarkable buildings that make poor use of a good plot. But a replacement dwelling is a full planning application in its own right, judged on the merits of the new house and its impact on the site and surroundings.

The council's assessment of a replacement dwelling focuses on scale and bulk relative to what was there and to the surroundings, on the design quality of the new house, on its impact on neighbours' amenity (daylight, outlook, privacy and sense of enclosure), and on trees and landscape. A common reason replacement schemes struggle is over-development: a new house markedly larger and bulkier than the one it replaces, and out of scale with its neighbours, invites refusal even where the principle of a replacement is accepted. The plan's amenity policy — with its separation distances between habitable-room windows — is frequently decisive here.

Where the plot is in the Green Belt or on Metropolitan Open Land — and more than half the borough is — a replacement dwelling faces a further, specific test. National Green Belt policy and the Local Plan generally allow a replacement dwelling only where the new house is not materially larger than the one it replaces. That size constraint is strict and is measured carefully, so on a Green Belt or MOL plot the design has to deliver a much better house within broadly the same volume, rather than a bigger one. Establishing whether the plot carries this constraint is one of the first things we check, because it fundamentally shapes what is achievable.

The demolition itself also needs handling. In a conservation area, demolition is controlled; on any site there are practical and regulatory requirements around demolition notices, party wall matters where the existing or new house adjoins a neighbour, protection of retained trees, and asbestos and waste. We coordinate the demolition strategy with the design so that the transition from old house to new is planned rather than improvised, and so the new foundations and structure suit both the plot and whatever is safely retained. A well-run replacement dwelling replaces a poor house with an excellent one at a scale the council can accept — that balance is the whole art of it.

Some of the most valuable — and most contested — bespoke house opportunities in Richmond are backland and garden plots: a new home built in a large rear garden, on a corner plot, or on a piece of land behind or between existing houses. In a densely built borough these plots are how a meaningful number of the Local Plan's new homes will actually be delivered, but they raise particular planning concerns, and the council scrutinises them closely.

The first concern is 'garden-grabbing' — the loss of gardens and green space to development, which planning policy has long sought to resist where it harms the character of an area. A garden plot scheme has to show that the new house does not erode the openness, greenery and spacious character that give many Richmond streets their quality, and that it respects the established pattern of development rather than cramming a house into a space the street was never meant to hold. The plan's biodiversity and tree policies bear directly on this, since garden plots are often where mature trees and habitat stand.

The second concern is amenity — for the new house and for its neighbours. Backland plots are frequently landlocked or awkwardly shaped, with the new house close to the rear windows and gardens of surrounding homes. The design has to protect neighbours from overlooking, loss of light and a sense of enclosure, and give the new house its own decent light, outlook and privacy, all while providing safe, adequate access. Separation distances, careful window placement, single-storey or set-down elements, and thoughtful landscaping are the tools that make a backland house acceptable.

The third is access and servicing: a new house needs a proper, safe route in for people, vehicles, refuse and emergency access, and on a landlocked plot that can be the make-or-break issue. We assess all three — character, amenity and access — at feasibility, and design the house around them, because a backland or garden scheme that ignores any one of them will be refused. Done well, an infill house can be a genuine enhancement, adding a carefully designed home that respects its setting; done badly, it is the classic over-development the council exists to prevent.

Richmond's reputation as a heritage borough can suggest that only pastiche is permitted — a new house pretending to be old. That is not how the borough's own policy works. The council's design tests ask for high-quality design that responds to local character; they do not require imitation. A confident, contemporary house that reads its context intelligently — its scale, its rhythm, its materials, its relationship to the street and the landscape — can be exactly the 'enhancement' a conservation area is asked to accommodate, and some of the borough's best new houses are unmistakably modern.

There is also a national route, sometimes relevant on the borough's rarest sites, for genuinely exceptional isolated homes. Paragraph 84(e) of the National Planning Policy Framework (the provision formerly at paragraph 79, and before that paragraph 55) allows an isolated new home in the countryside where the design is truly outstanding, reflecting the highest standards in architecture, significantly enhancing its setting and being sensitive to the character of the area. This is a very demanding test and applies only to isolated rural sites, of which Richmond has few, but where a plot might qualify it opens a door that ordinary policy would keep shut. We advise honestly on whether a site could ever meet it — the bar is deliberately high.

For the great majority of design-led houses, though, the route is the ordinary full application, won on the strength of the architecture. The council maintains design review and expects design and access statements that explain the thinking, and it responds well to schemes that are demonstrably considered — where the massing, the fenestration, the materials and the landscape have clearly been developed in response to the site and the surroundings. A house that looks like a serious piece of architecture, supported by drawings and statements that make its case, is far more persuasive than one that hopes to slip through on modesty alone.

Our approach to design-led houses is to treat every one as a genuine architectural problem: what does this specific place ask for, and how can a new house both belong to it and improve it? That question produces contemporary houses and quietly traditional ones, according to the site — but always houses conceived as a response to their setting. In a borough that judges applications on design above almost everything, that is not just good architecture; it is the winning planning strategy.

A bespoke house is designed around how you live, but it also has to meet the standards that apply to every new home. The most important is the nationally described space standard, introduced on 27 March 2015 and applied in London through the London Plan. It sets minimum gross internal floor areas by the number of bedrooms and occupants: a one-bedroom, one-person home at least 37 square metres (39 with a separate bathroom rather than a shower room), a one-bedroom, two-person home at least 50 square metres, a two-bedroom, three-person home at least 70 square metres, and larger minimums as the home grows. On a bespoke house these are floors, not targets — most of our clients build well above them — but the layout still has to satisfy them room by room.

The standard also sets the detail. A single bedroom must be at least 7.5 square metres and at least 2.15 metres wide; a double or twin bedroom at least 11.5 square metres and at least 2.75 metres wide. There are built-in storage minimums, and — importantly for a house with rooms in the roof or a basement — a minimum floor-to-ceiling height of 2.3 metres over at least 75 per cent of the gross internal area of each habitable room. These dimensions quietly govern a great deal of a house's plan and section, and designing to them from the outset avoids the awkward compromises that come from discovering a room is fractionally too small or too low.

Beyond the numbers, a bespoke house is where layout and light really earn their keep. The whole point of designing a home from scratch is to get the orientation right — living spaces to the sun and the best outlook, service rooms where light matters less; to make the circulation efficient rather than wasteful; to bring daylight deep into the plan through the right windows, roof lights and, where appropriate, double-height spaces; and to connect the house to its garden and to any river or parkland view. These are the things a standard house type can never do for a specific plot, and they are the reason a bespoke house is worth commissioning.

We design the plan and section together so that space, light, storage and ceiling height all resolve at once, and so the standards are met without the house ever feeling standardised. The result is a home that is generous where it matters, efficient where it can be, and shaped precisely around the site and the way its owners will use it — which is, in the end, the entire promise of bespoke design.

A new house is a complete structure from the ground up, and the structural design is where a bespoke home is made to stand safely and economically on its particular plot. Crown provides the structural engineering in-house alongside the architecture, so the structure is developed with the design rather than imposed on it afterwards — which matters enormously on the open-plan spaces, large openings and cantilevers that clients now expect, and on the awkward, constrained plots that Richmond so often presents.

It starts below ground. The foundations have to suit the ground conditions, and Richmond's are varied — river terrace gravels and alluvium near the Thames, London Clay across much of the borough, made ground on former developed sites. London Clay is a shrinkable clay that moves with moisture, so foundation design has to account for it, and the many mature trees the borough protects add a further factor, since tree roots draw moisture from clay and influence foundation depth. A proper ground investigation and a foundation design matched to the soil and the trees are essential; getting this wrong is expensive and, on a clay site near large trees, potentially serious.

Above ground, the frame is chosen to suit the architecture and the site. A bespoke house might be traditional masonry, a timber frame, a steel frame for long spans and big openings, or a hybrid — and increasingly clients are interested in lower-carbon structures such as engineered timber. Whatever the system, the open living spaces, the wide glazed openings onto the garden, the roof terraces and the double-height voids that make a bespoke house special all depend on steelwork and structural design worked out in coordination with the plan. Designing the structure and the architecture together is how you get the airy, light-filled spaces without the clumsy downstand beams and columns that spoil a poorly coordinated house.

Constrained and sensitive sites bring their own structural challenges. A replacement dwelling has to deal with demolishing the old structure and building anew, sometimes retaining a wall or foundation. A backland plot may have difficult access for materials and plant. A basement — popular in this borough for adding space without adding bulk — is a major piece of structural and waterproofing engineering, with implications for neighbouring buildings, groundwater and the party wall. We resolve all of this as part of the design, so the house you are shown is one that can actually be built on your plot, at a sensible cost, without nasty surprises when the engineer finally looks at it.

A bespoke house is only as good as the systems that make it comfortable, quiet and efficient to run, and the building services — mechanical, electrical and plumbing — deserve to be designed as carefully as the architecture. Crown designs the services in-house alongside the structure and the architecture, so heating, hot water, ventilation, drainage, electrics and controls are integrated into the house rather than squeezed in after the fact. On a modern, well-insulated house, this coordination is what separates a home that performs as intended from one that is uncomfortable and expensive despite good intentions.

Heating and hot water now sit at the centre of the design. New homes are moving decisively away from gas boilers towards low-carbon heating — principally air-source heat pumps, and ground-source heat pumps where the plot allows — driven by the direction of Building Regulations and the coming Future Homes Standard. A heat pump changes the design: it needs space, a sensible location for the external unit (which has visual and acoustic implications on a tight or sensitive plot), and a heating system, usually underfloor, sized to run at the lower flow temperatures heat pumps prefer. Designing around this from the start produces a warm, cheap-to-run house; retrofitting it later produces compromises.

Ventilation matters more as houses get more airtight. A well-sealed modern home needs proper ventilation to stay healthy and free of condensation, and many bespoke houses now use mechanical ventilation with heat recovery (MVHR), which supplies fresh air while recovering heat from the air it extracts. That system needs ductwork routes, plant space and careful commissioning — all things best planned into the structure early. Alongside it sit the electrical design (including provision for solar PV, battery storage and electric-vehicle charging), lighting, data and smart controls, water supply and drainage, and increasingly rainwater management as part of the sustainable-drainage strategy.

Bringing all of this together with the architecture and structure is the whole point of a coordinated, single-team approach. The riser that carries services up through the house, the plant space, the ceiling voids for ductwork, the location of the heat pump and the solar panels, the drainage runs — each of these has to be resolved with the plan and the structure, not against them. A house designed this way is comfortable, quiet, cheap to run and free of the visible compromises that betray a services design added as an afterthought.

Every new house has to meet Part L of the Building Regulations, which governs the conservation of fuel and power, and it is one of the areas changing fastest. The current standard already demands a substantial improvement in the energy and carbon performance of new homes over previous editions, assessed through the Standard Assessment Procedure (SAP) — the government methodology that calculates a new dwelling's energy use and carbon emissions and produces its Energy Performance Certificate. Every new house needs SAP calculations at design stage to demonstrate compliance, and an as-built assessment on completion.

The bigger change is the Future Homes Standard. The government has confirmed the direction of travel: new homes are to be 'zero-carbon ready', with carbon emissions cut by around 75 to 80 per cent compared with earlier standards, achieved through very low-carbon heating and high fabric performance rather than fossil-fuel boilers. The final technical detail has been settled and the new standard is set to come into force in 2027, with a transitional period following — so a house being designed now should be designed with the Future Homes Standard clearly in view, because it will govern homes completing in the years ahead and it is simply the sensible way to build.

In practice this means designing the fabric and the systems together for genuine low-carbon performance: high levels of insulation and airtightness in the walls, roof and floor; high-performance glazing carefully balanced for solar gain and daylight; a heat pump rather than a gas boiler; mechanical ventilation with heat recovery to keep an airtight house healthy; and, under the emerging standard, rooftop solar photovoltaic panels sized in relation to the home's footprint. A bespoke house is the ideal vehicle for all of this, because the fabric, orientation and systems can be optimised together from the first sketch rather than compromised by a standard type.

There is a Richmond dimension too. The borough's design and conservation policies mean the low-carbon technologies have to be integrated sensitively — solar panels and heat-pump units placed and detailed so they sit comfortably on a house in a conservation area or near a listed building, rather than clashing with it. Doing that well is an architectural problem as much as an engineering one, and it is exactly the kind of thing a coordinated architecture-and-services team resolves in the design rather than leaving to a later, clumsier fix. A well-designed Richmond house can be genuinely low-carbon and genuinely handsome at once.

Water is a defining issue in a Thames-side borough, and a new house has to deal with it properly. Foul drainage — the waste from kitchens and bathrooms — needs a designed, adequate connection to the public sewer, which on a constrained or backland plot is not always straightforward and occasionally needs a pumped solution. Surface-water drainage — rainwater from roofs and paving — has to be managed so the new house does not increase flood risk or overload the drains, and this is where sustainable drainage systems come in.

Sustainable drainage systems (SuDS) manage rainwater close to where it falls, mimicking natural drainage rather than piping everything straight to the sewer. On a house that can mean permeable paving, soakaways where the ground allows, rain gardens and planted areas, water butts and attenuation storage, and green or blue roofs on flat-roofed elements. Richmond, like all London boroughs, expects new development to incorporate SuDS and to reduce surface-water run-off, and it dovetails with the biodiversity and greening expectations in the Local Plan — a well-designed SuDS scheme is good for water and for wildlife at once.

Flood risk is a real constraint on parts of the borough. Land along the Thames and its tributaries falls within the flood zones, and a house on such a plot needs a flood risk assessment and a design that responds to it — raised finished floor levels, flood-resilient construction and materials at low level, safe access and egress, and sometimes the sequential thinking that steers development away from the highest-risk areas. Tidal and fluvial flooding both matter here, and the council and the Environment Agency will scrutinise a riverside scheme closely.

We assess drainage and flood risk at feasibility, because on some plots they shape the whole design — the finished floor level, the ground-floor layout, the extent of hard surfacing and the drainage strategy all follow from them. Designing the drainage and flood response into the house from the start, as part of a coordinated scheme, avoids the late redesigns and refusals that come from treating water as an afterthought on a riverside borough's plots.

A new house — especially a replacement dwelling or a tight infill plot — is usually built close to neighbours, and the legal and practical relationship with those neighbours has to be managed alongside the design and the planning. The Party Wall etc. Act 1996 governs works that affect a shared (party) wall, that build on or up to the boundary, or that excavate near a neighbouring building's foundations — all of which are common when demolishing and rebuilding a house or digging foundations and basements on a constrained plot. The Act requires notice to be served on affected neighbours and, where they do not consent, a surveyor-led award process.

Party wall matters are separate from planning permission — you can have full permission and still be unable to start until the party wall procedures are complete — so they need to be started in good time. On a Richmond plot where houses sit close together, or where a basement is proposed, party wall issues are often significant, and handling them early and properly keeps the project on programme and the neighbour relationships intact. We flag the likely party wall position at design stage so it is planned for, not discovered late.

Demolition itself is a controlled activity. In a conservation area — most of the borough — the demolition of a building is subject to control and may need consent, and even outside conservation areas there are notice requirements, and health-and-safety and waste obligations, for demolishing a house. Asbestos surveys, safe demolition method statements, protection of retained trees and neighbouring structures, and proper waste management all form part of a responsible demolition. We coordinate the demolition strategy with the new design so the site transitions cleanly from the old house to the new.

Good practice with neighbours goes beyond the legal minimum. On a bespoke house in an established Richmond street, keeping neighbours informed, designing to protect their amenity, and managing construction considerately all reduce the objections that can slow or sink an application and make the build itself far less fraught. A house designed with the neighbours in mind — respecting their light, outlook and privacy — is both easier to consent and a better neighbour once it is built.

A new house creates new floorspace, and new floorspace is generally liable for the Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL) — a charge, levied per square metre, that councils use to fund the infrastructure that development relies on. In Richmond upon Thames there are two layers. The borough's own CIL applies at a residential rate that varies by area: a higher band across the north and east of the borough (including Barnes, eastern Twickenham and most of Richmond) and a lower band across the south and west (including Teddington and western Twickenham). The underlying rates were set at £250 and £190 per square metre respectively when the schedule was adopted, and they are index-linked, so the amounts actually charged are higher — in recent years around £409 and £311 per square metre.

On top of the borough CIL sits the Mayor of London's CIL (currently MCIL2), charged in Richmond at £80 per square metre on most development, which funds strategic transport infrastructure such as the Elizabeth line and its successors. Both charges are calculated on the net additional floorspace a scheme creates — which is why a replacement dwelling is treated differently from a new house on a vacant plot: on a replacement, the floorspace of the lawful building being demolished can, subject to the rules on how recently it was in use, be offset against the new floorspace, so CIL is charged only on the net increase.

There are reliefs and exemptions worth knowing about. A self-build exemption is available where you are building your own home to live in, which can remove the borough CIL liability entirely on a genuine self-build — but it depends on following the correct procedure precisely, submitting the right forms and commencement notices before starting work, and meeting a clawback period afterwards. Missing a step in the CIL process can turn an expected exemption into a full, immediate liability, so the paperwork has to be handled with care and in the right order.

Beyond CIL, larger schemes can attract planning obligations under a Section 106 agreement, though most individual bespoke houses fall below the thresholds that trigger affordable-housing and major-obligation requirements. We calculate the likely CIL early, advise on whether a self-build or other exemption applies and how to secure it, and make sure the commencement and exemption notices are served correctly, because CIL is one of the areas where a simple procedural slip has a real financial cost.

A bespoke house is delivered through a recognised sequence of design stages — broadly the RIBA Plan of Work — and at each stage we produce the drawings and documents the project needs. It begins with feasibility and briefing (RIBA Stages 0-1): understanding your brief and budget, surveying and assessing the plot, checking its planning designations and constraints, and testing what is achievable, so you start with a realistic picture rather than a hopeful one.

Concept design (Stage 2) develops the idea of the house — its arrangement, form, massing and character — in response to the site and the brief, so you can see and shape the design before it is committed. Then comes the planning application itself, which for a Richmond new home is a full, coordinated package: an accurate measured survey and existing-site drawings; proposed plans, elevations and sections; a site and location plan; a design and access statement setting out the design thinking and how it responds to local character; and the technical assessments the site calls for — heritage or conservation-area appraisal, arboricultural (tree) survey and report, flood risk assessment, ecology and biodiversity net-gain information, transport and parking, and daylight/sunlight where neighbours' amenity is in play.

Once permission is granted, developed and technical design (Stages 3-4) turn the consented scheme into a fully worked, buildable house: detailed architectural drawings, the structural engineering design and calculations, the building-services (MEP) design, the specification, and the Building Regulations submission covering structure, fire, energy (Part L and SAP), sound, ventilation, drainage, access and the rest. This is the coordinated set your contractor and building-control body build from, and because we produce the architecture, structure and services in-house, it is genuinely integrated rather than a collection of separate consultants' drawings that have to be reconciled on site.

Everything is prepared to be internally consistent — the areas on the plans match the schedules and the statements, the structural drawings match the architecture, the services routes match the plan, the energy strategy matches the fabric. A coordinated, self-consistent set of information is materially more likely to secure permission and to build cleanly, and it is far easier for a case officer to recommend and a contractor to price. That consistency is one of the main advantages of a single team taking the house from first sketch to finished building.

The process starts with feasibility, and on a bespoke house in Richmond this stage repays every hour spent on it. We survey the plot, establish its designations — conservation area, listed-building setting, Green Belt or MOL, flood zone, protected view, tree constraints — check the planning history, and test the brief against what the site and the policy will realistically allow. This is where we tell you honestly what kind of house is achievable, which consents it needs, and where the real opportunities and constraints lie, before you commit to a full design.

Because Richmond judges applications so heavily on design and heritage, pre-application advice is frequently worthwhile on a bespoke house — especially in a conservation area, near a listed building, or on a Green Belt or backland plot. A written pre-application response from the council, and where relevant a design review, lets us develop the scheme in the direction the council will support and signals to the eventual case officer that the proposal has been thought through. It is not compulsory, but on a design-led scheme in a sensitive borough it often saves time and de-risks the full application.

We then prepare and submit the full planning application through the Planning Portal — the coordinated drawing set, the design and access statement, and the technical assessments the site requires — and manage it through validation, consultation and determination. The council consults neighbours and statutory bodies, the case officer assesses the scheme against the Local Plan and London Plan, and a decision follows; a straightforward householder-scale new home is determined on the shorter statutory target, while a more complex scheme takes longer, and we handle the case officer's queries and any negotiation along the way.

Once permission is granted, we discharge any pre-commencement conditions, complete the technical and Building Regulations design, and support you through appointing a contractor and starting on site. The Building Regulations approval — covering structure, fire, energy, sound, ventilation, drainage and access — runs alongside, through either the local authority building control or an approved inspector. Because the same team that secured the permission produces the structural, services and construction information, the transition from consent to site is smooth, and there is a single accountable point of contact from the first survey to the finished house.

The cost of a bespoke house divides into design and consultant fees, statutory and application costs, and the construction cost itself. Our design fee covers the architecture, structural engineering and building-services design across the RIBA stages, and we scope it to your specific project and give you a clear basis for it before any drawing work begins, so you know what our part costs from the outset. Bringing architecture, structure and services together under one roof also tends to reduce the total consultant spend compared with appointing each separately.

Separate from our fee are the statutory and third-party costs: the council's planning application fee (set nationally and modest for a single dwelling relative to the project as a whole); any pre-application advice fee, which is usually money well spent on a Richmond scheme; the specialist reports the site needs — heritage, arboricultural, flood risk, ecology, ground investigation and survey; the Building Regulations charges; and the Community Infrastructure Levy on the new floorspace, unless a self-build exemption applies. We set all of these out early so the full picture is clear rather than emerging piecemeal.

Construction is the largest cost, and on a bespoke house it depends on size, specification, the difficulty of the site and the ambition of the design. Richmond plots often carry cost-adding factors — constrained access, basements, tree protection, clay foundations, sensitive detailing to satisfy conservation requirements, and the low-carbon systems now expected — so a realistic budget is set with these in mind from the start rather than discovered later. We design to your budget as a discipline throughout, testing the cost implications of design decisions as they are made, so the house that is drawn is one that can actually be built for what you can spend.

On timescales, a bespoke house is a genuine project. Feasibility and concept design take weeks to a few months depending on complexity; a full planning application is determined on the statutory targets for a single dwelling but, with pre-application and any negotiation, the planning phase commonly runs several months; technical design and Building Regulations follow; and construction of a whole new house is a substantial programme in its own right, typically a year or more on site. We give you a realistic overall programme for your specific scheme at the outset, and manage it stage by stage so the project moves forward predictably.

Understanding why applications fail is the best way to make sure yours does not, and in a design-conscious borough like Richmond the reasons cluster around a few themes. The first and most common is design quality and character: a new house judged to fail the borough's core design test — out of scale, poorly proportioned, using inappropriate materials, or simply not responding to the local character — will be refused, however functional it is inside. This is the single biggest risk, and it is why the design has to be conceived as a response to its setting from the start.

The second is harm to heritage — to a conservation area's character or appearance, to the setting of a listed building, or to a protected view. Given 87 conservation areas and hundreds of listed buildings, most Richmond plots engage one of these, and an application that harms the heritage asset, or fails to demonstrate that it preserves or enhances it, invites refusal on statutory heritage grounds. A proper heritage assessment and a genuinely context-driven design are the answer.

The third is amenity and over-development. A house that is too big or bulky for its plot, that harms neighbours through loss of light, overlooking or a sense of enclosure, or that crams a home onto a garden or backland plot in a way that erodes the area's spacious character, will be refused on amenity and character grounds — the plan's separation distances and its resistance to garden-grabbing bite here. On Green Belt and MOL plots, a replacement dwelling that is materially larger than the one it replaces fails the specific Green Belt test.

Beyond these, schemes are refused for the loss of protected trees or inadequate arboricultural information, for flood risk not properly addressed on a riverside plot, for poor or unsafe access on a backland site, and for failing the technical policies on drainage, biodiversity or sustainable design. Our approach is to anticipate every one of these at feasibility and answer it in the design and the application itself — and to be honest with you early if a plot carries a constraint that cannot be overcome, because there is no value in a house designed to be refused.

Crown Architecture designs bespoke new homes across Richmond upon Thames — in Richmond, Kew, Barnes, Twickenham, Ham, Petersham, East Sheen, Teddington and the borough's villages — and we do it as a single, coordinated service: the architecture, the structural engineering and the building services under one roof. On a whole new house that integration is decisive. The plan, the structure, the energy strategy and the services are completely interdependent; designed separately they clash and compromise each other, and designed together they produce the light-filled, efficient, buildable house that is the whole point of going bespoke.

We know the Richmond planning context specifically: the Local Plan adopted in October 2025 and its design, amenity and biodiversity policies; the borough's 87 conservation areas and the statutory duty that governs applications within them; the listed-building and World Heritage Site settings around Kew; the Green Belt and Metropolitan Open Land constraints that cover more than half the borough and the replacement-dwelling limits that flow from them; and the CIL rates and self-build exemption that determine what a new home costs to consent. We use that knowledge to give you honest advice at feasibility, before you commit.

Just as importantly, we treat every house as a genuine piece of architecture, conceived as a response to its plot and its setting rather than a type dropped onto a site — because in Richmond, design quality is not decoration, it is the planning strategy. We prepare coordinated, self-consistent applications that a case officer can recommend and a contractor can price, we engage the council through pre-application where it de-risks a design-led scheme, and we design to your budget and your brief as a discipline throughout.

We also stay with the project from the first sketch to the finished house. We manage the application through Richmond's determination, discharge conditions, complete the structural, services and Building Regulations design, and support you through construction — so there is one accountable team from the initial site visit to the day you move in. That continuity is how a bespoke house in one of London's most demanding boroughs gets designed, consented and built without the gaps and hand-offs that undermine so many projects.

If you are thinking about a bespoke new home in Richmond — a new house on a plot, a replacement dwelling, a backland or garden scheme, or a design-led house on a sensitive site — send us the address and what you have in mind, and we will tell you honestly what is achievable, which consents it needs, and how to get there.