New House in a Garden in Ealing

A new house in a garden is exactly what it sounds like: creating a whole new dwelling on land that is currently part of the garden of an existing home. In planning terms the existing house and its garden are a single Use Class C3 residential unit; what you are proposing is to carve out part of that curtilage and build a separate C3 dwellinghouse on it. The new home might sit alongside the existing house on a wide plot, behind it in the back garden (what planners call 'backland' development), in a gap between existing houses (an 'infill' plot), or on a corner or a large plot that can be genuinely subdivided.

The people who ask us about this fall into a few groups. Some own a large plot — common in Ealing's more spacious Victorian and Edwardian streets and its interwar suburbs — and want to release value from part of the garden while keeping their own house. Some have inherited or bought a house with a garden big enough that a second home seems feasible. Some are developers or investors who have identified a garden or backland plot with development potential. And some are families who want to build a home for a relative, or a smaller home to downsize into, within the grounds of a house they already own.

Whatever the motive, the planning question is the same: can this piece of garden land properly accommodate a new dwelling, judged against everything Ealing's Local Plan requires? That is not a question about your legal right to build on your own land — you have no automatic right to do so — but about whether the council can be persuaded that a new house here would be acceptable in planning terms. A new dwelling almost always needs full planning permission, and that application is where the whole thing is won or lost.

The first thing we do on any new-house-in-a-garden instruction in Ealing, therefore, is give you an honest feasibility view: whether the plot is genuinely capable of taking a house, what size and form of house it could realistically support, and what the main obstacles will be. A great deal of money and disappointment is saved by establishing this before a full application is designed, because the difference between a plot that can take a house and one that cannot is often not obvious to an owner who knows only their own garden. Everything that follows on this page is organised around that central feasibility question.

The single most important point is that building a new house is not permitted development. Permitted development rights let you do certain things to an existing house — some extensions, a loft conversion, outbuildings within limits — without a full planning application. They do not allow you to build a whole new, separate dwelling. Creating a new house in a garden is therefore, in almost every case, full planning permission, applied for and determined by Ealing Council as the local planning authority.

This matters because a full planning application is judged against the entire Local Plan and the National Planning Policy Framework, not against a narrow checklist. When you extend a house under permitted development, the council's role is limited; when you apply to build a new dwelling in a garden, the council weighs the proposal against its policies on housing, design and character, residential amenity, access and highways, trees and biodiversity, drainage and flood risk, and its approach to developing garden land. Every one of those is a potential reason for refusal, and every one has to be answered in the application.

There is a common misconception that an outbuilding, an 'annexe' or a 'granny flat' in the garden can be built under permitted development and then quietly become an independent home. It cannot. An outbuilding permitted under householder rights must be incidental to the main house and cannot be a separate dwelling; the moment it is used as an independent home — with its own council tax, its own front door as a separate unit, its own household living independently — it is a material change of use and, if built without permission, unlawful. If what you actually want is a separate house, the honest route is a full planning application for a new dwelling from the outset.

A related route worth mentioning is a Lawful Development Certificate, which confirms that something is lawful — but that is for genuinely permitted or immune development, not a way to sidestep the need for permission for a new house. For a new dwelling in a garden, the correct and only reliable route is a full planning application, and the whole of this page is about making that application succeed. We establish the route with certainty at the outset so you never build on a false assumption about what is and is not permitted.

To understand why new houses in gardens are so sensitive in Ealing, you have to understand the borough's character, because that character is the yardstick against which these applications are judged. Ealing earned the title 'Queen of the Suburbs' — a phrase coined around 1902 and associated with the borough surveyor Charles Jones — precisely because of its leafy, spacious, garden-rich residential streets. It was marketed as a country town near London: well connected by rail, but green, generous and orderly, with tree-lined roads and substantial houses set in real gardens. That spaciousness is not incidental to Ealing; it is the essence of what makes it Ealing, and it is exactly what garden development risks eroding.

The borough's landmarks reinforce the point. Pitzhanger Manor, remodelled by the architect Sir John Soane in the early 1800s as his own country villa, sits in the beautifully landscaped Walpole Park — some twelve hectares of Grade II-listed historic parkland at the heart of Ealing, opened to the public in 1901. Ealing Studios, the oldest continuously working film studio in the world and the home of the classic Ealing comedies, has been making films here since the early twentieth century. These places speak to a suburb that has always valued its green settings and its distinctive, well-made environment.

Above all, Ealing has Brentham Garden Suburb — an Edwardian garden suburb built between about 1901 and 1915, one of the earliest and most influential planned garden suburbs in the country, designated a conservation area and protected by a comprehensive Article 4 direction that removes virtually all permitted development rights so that even small external changes need permission. Brentham is the physical embodiment of the garden-suburb ideal: houses set in green, generous plots as a deliberate design principle. Across the borough there are around 29 conservation areas covering Victorian streets, Edwardian suburbs, village greens and interwar estates — a very large proportion of Ealing's residential fabric carries some form of special character protection.

For a new-house-in-a-garden scheme, this context is not background colour — it is the heart of the planning case. The council assesses your proposal against the established character and the spacious, garden-rich pattern of the surrounding area. In a conservation area, or under an Article 4 direction, the bar is higher still and the presumption against harmful backland development is stronger. The borough that calls itself the Queen of the Suburbs is, by design and by policy, protective of the very gardens you are proposing to build in — which is why the design has to work with that character rather than against it.

The term 'garden-grabbing' describes the practice of building new homes on residential garden land, and it drove a specific and lasting change in national planning policy that bears directly on your scheme. For years, private residential gardens were treated as 'previously developed land' — brownfield land — which carried a policy presumption in favour of development. That classification encouraged a wave of infill and backland house-building on gardens across suburban England, including in boroughs like Ealing, and it provoked a strong public and political reaction about the loss of gardens, trees and suburban character.

In June 2010 the government acted. Through a Written Ministerial Statement and guidance to councils, it removed private residential gardens in built-up areas from the definition of previously developed land, and gave councils clearer powers to resist unwanted garden development. That change is carried through into the National Planning Policy Framework to this day: the NPPF's definition of previously developed (brownfield) land expressly excludes 'land in built-up areas such as private residential gardens, parks, recreation grounds and allotments'. In other words, a garden in a built-up area is not brownfield land, and does not carry the policy encouragement that brownfield land does.

The practical effect for an Ealing scheme is significant. Your garden plot does not benefit from any presumption in favour of development as brownfield land would; the council starts from a neutral or, in sensitive areas, sceptical position, and the proposal has to earn its permission on its planning merits — character, amenity, access, trees, drainage and design. It also means the council can, quite legitimately, resist the loss of garden land where it would harm the character of the area or the amenity of neighbours. This is the policy backdrop against which every new-house-in-a-garden application in Ealing is read.

It is worth being precise about what the 2010 change did and did not do. It did not ban building on gardens — new houses in gardens are still approved where they are acceptable in planning terms. What it did was remove the artificial encouragement that had treated gardens as brownfield, and restore the council's ability to judge each garden proposal on its merits and to say no where a scheme would harm the area. A well-conceived house on a genuinely suitable plot can still succeed; it simply has to make the case rather than relying on a brownfield presumption that no longer exists.

Backland development — building a new house on land behind existing houses, typically in the depth of a back garden reached down a narrow access — is the most contested form of garden development and the one Ealing scrutinises most heavily. It is contested because it tends to introduce a house into a private, enclosed, green interior of a block that was never intended to be built on, with all the problems that brings: overlooking of surrounding gardens and rear windows, loss of the open garden outlook that neighbours enjoy, an awkward or unneighbourly access, and a form of development that can read as cramped and out of keeping with the surrounding pattern of houses fronting the street.

Ealing's civic and amenity bodies, and the council itself, have long been wary of backland schemes for precisely these reasons — poor design, difficult access and siting, and harm to the spacious character of the borough. It is common for backland applications in Ealing to be refused, taken to appeal, and refused again, particularly in conservation areas where the enclosed green interiors of blocks are part of what makes the area special. A backland scheme therefore starts from a difficult position and has to overcome real, well-understood objections to have any chance of success.

That does not mean backland development is impossible in Ealing — it means it has to be exceptionally well judged. The plot has to be genuinely large enough to take a house with proper separation from every surrounding boundary; the access has to be safe, usable and not harmful to the neighbours it passes; the new house has to be designed at a scale and in a form that sits comfortably in the interior of the block without dominating it or overlooking its neighbours; trees have to be retained and protected; and the amenity of both the new home and every surrounding property has to be demonstrably acceptable. Where all of that is true, a backland house can be approved; where any of it is forced, it will not.

We approach backland schemes with honesty first. At feasibility we assess whether the interior of the block can actually accommodate a house that respects every boundary and every neighbour, or whether the plot is simply too tight — and we tell you plainly which it is. A backland scheme designed around genuine separation, a workable access and a form that belongs in the block is a very different thing from one squeezed into a garden that cannot really take it, and only the first kind is worth pursuing.

Not every new house in a garden is a difficult backland scheme. Some of the most successful garden dwellings in Ealing are infill and side-garden houses that complete the street rather than intrude behind it. An infill plot is a gap in an otherwise continuous frontage — a wide side garden, a former garden severed from a corner plot, a space between two houses — where a new house can be built fronting the street in the same way as its neighbours. Because such a house reads as part of the established building line and pattern, it is far easier to make acceptable than a house hidden behind the frontage.

Side-garden plots are common in Ealing's more generously spaced streets, particularly on corner sites and on the wider Edwardian and interwar plots. Here the key questions are whether the new house maintains the rhythm and spacing of the street — the gaps between buildings that give a road its character — whether it respects the building line and the height and form of its neighbours, and whether both the existing and the new house retain reasonable gardens, parking and amenity. A side-garden house that keeps the spacing and matches the grain of the street can be a genuinely good piece of infill; one that fills the gap too tightly, leaving cramped plots on either side, will be resisted.

Subdividing a large plot — splitting a big garden so that the existing house keeps part of it and a new house takes the rest — is a related exercise, most feasible on the borough's larger Victorian and Edwardian plots and in areas of more spacious character. The test is whether, after subdivision, both plots still function well: each with an adequate garden and amenity space, sensible access and parking, proper separation between the houses, and a form and density that still fits the area. Over-subdivision — cramming a house onto a plot that leaves both homes with too little — is a classic refusal reason, so the split has to be genuinely comfortable, not the maximum the land can be made to hold.

Whatever the plot type, the underlying discipline is the same: the new house has to sit naturally in the established pattern of the area — its building line, its spacing, its scale and its garden setting — rather than fighting it. We assess each plot type on its own facts, and we are candid about which are realistic. An infill or side-garden house that completes a street well is often a far stronger proposition than a backland house behind it, and part of our feasibility work is identifying which kind of scheme your land can actually support.

A new house in a garden in Ealing is judged against the council's development plan, which currently comprises the adopted Ealing planning documents together with the London Plan. Ealing's Development (or Development Management) policies require new development to respond to its physical context and to respect the established local character and the pattern of building, spaces, landscape and topography — language that is directly aimed at exactly the character and grain questions a garden house raises. The council's design policy and the London Plan's design policy (Policy D3, on optimising site capacity through a design-led approach) both require development to be appropriate to its context, which for garden schemes means the spacious, garden-rich Ealing setting.

Ealing is also part-way through a new Local Plan covering the period 2024 to 2039, which was submitted to the government for independent examination in November 2024 and, at the time of writing, is working through that examination. The new plan addresses housing supply, density and intensification, tall buildings, character-led growth, and the borough's green assets — all of which bear on where and how new homes, including garden dwellings, are acceptable. Because the policy position is genuinely in transition, we always check the current status of both the adopted policies and the emerging Local Plan when we advise on a specific site, since the weight given to emerging policy changes as the plan advances through examination towards adoption.

Beyond the strategic policies, several recurring themes govern garden schemes specifically, and we frame every application around them. Character and design: the new house must fit the established pattern, building line, spacing, scale and materials of the area. Residential amenity: it must not cause unacceptable overlooking, loss of privacy, overshadowing or loss of outlook for neighbours, and it must give its own occupiers proper light, outlook, privacy and garden space. Access and parking: a safe, usable access and appropriate parking, without harm to the street or to the properties an access passes. Trees, landscaping and biodiversity: retention of important trees and net gains where required. Drainage and sustainability: managing surface water and meeting energy standards. Each of these is a distinct policy test.

In conservation areas and areas under Article 4 directions — a very large part of residential Ealing — additional heritage and character policies apply, and the presumption against harmful backland and garden development is stronger. Brentham Garden Suburb, with its comprehensive Article 4 direction, is the clearest example: development there is judged against a detailed conservation-area design guide, and the garden-set character is fiercely protected. Knowing precisely which designations cover your plot, and which policies therefore apply, is the foundation of a credible application, and it is the first thing we establish.

A new house has to be a proper home, and in London that means meeting recognised space and amenity standards from the outset. The nationally described space standard sets minimum internal floor areas by the number of bedrooms and occupants: a one-bedroom, two-person home must be at least 50 square metres; a two-bedroom, three-person home at least 61 square metres; a two-bedroom, four-person home at least 70 square metres; a three-bedroom, five-person home at least 93 square metres over two storeys, and so on, with minimum bedroom sizes and built-in storage on top. These are floors, not targets, and a garden plot has to be big enough to hold a house that meets them comfortably.

The London Plan applies these space standards and adds further requirements that shape the design of a new home. It requires a floor-to-ceiling height of at least 2.5 metres for at least three-quarters of the internal area — more generous than the national minimum — which affects the section and the overall height of the house. It seeks to minimise single-aspect dwellings and to avoid single-aspect homes that are north-facing or exposed to noise, which matters on tight garden plots where a house may only be able to face one way. And it requires private outdoor amenity space — a minimum of five square metres for a one or two-person home, with more for larger households — so the new house needs its own usable garden or terrace, not just a footprint.

These standards interact with the plot in a way that is easy to underestimate. A garden that looks big enough for a house may, once you allow for the required internal floor area, adequate ceiling heights, private amenity space, separation from every boundary and the neighbours, parking and an access, turn out to support only a very modest home — or none at all. Testing a realistic, standards-compliant house against the actual plot, early, is the single most valuable thing we do at feasibility, because it tells you honestly what the land can carry before you invest in a full design.

Meeting the standards is also part of making the planning case. A new house that is properly sized, well lit, dual-aspect where possible, and provided with real garden space is a house the council can more readily accept as good-quality accommodation that will not itself become a cramped or poor-amenity home. A scheme that only works by squeezing below the standards, or by relying on a single north-facing aspect and a token yard, signals over-development and invites refusal. We design to the standards from the first sketch, so the house is both consentable and genuinely liveable.

Residential amenity is where garden schemes most often fail, because a new house dropped into a garden sits closer to more neighbours than almost any other development. The council assesses the impact on every surrounding property, and the recurring issues are overlooking and loss of privacy, overshadowing and loss of light, and loss of outlook — the pleasant open garden aspect that neighbours currently enjoy and that a new house can replace with a wall or a window. On a backland plot, where the house sits in the enclosed interior of a block surrounded by other gardens and rear windows, all of these pressures are at their most acute.

Overlooking is the classic problem. Windows in the new house — especially upper-floor windows and any facing side or rear boundaries — can look directly into neighbours' gardens and habitable rooms, and the loss of privacy that results is a common and decisive reason for refusal. The design has to manage this deliberately: careful window positioning, obscured glazing and high-level windows to bathrooms and circulation, roof forms that avoid overlooking, single-storey or reduced-height elements close to boundaries, and adequate separation distances between the new house and the surrounding homes. These are design decisions that have to be made from the outset, not patched in after an objection.

Overshadowing and loss of light are the other side of the coin. A new house, particularly a two-storey one, can cast shadow over neighbouring gardens and reduce daylight and sunlight to their windows. On tight or backland plots this has to be tested — often with a daylight and sunlight assessment against recognised guidance — and the height, position and form of the house shaped so that it does not deprive neighbours of reasonable light. The same discipline protects the new home itself: it needs adequate daylight, sunlight, outlook and privacy to be a decent place to live, which on an enclosed plot takes real design effort.

We design garden houses around amenity from the very first sketch, because on these plots amenity is not a constraint to be worked around — it is the design. Separation distances, window positions, the single-storey or two-storey question, the roof form, the boundary treatment and the position of the private garden are all set by what the neighbours and the new occupiers need. A scheme that respects amenity looks obviously reasonable to a case officer and to the neighbours who will comment on it; a scheme that does not invites the objections that sink garden applications.

How you reach a new house in a garden is often the making or breaking of the scheme, and on backland plots it is frequently the hardest single issue. A house behind existing houses has to be reached somehow — usually down a narrow strip of land alongside or between the existing buildings — and that access has to be safe, usable and not harmful to the properties it passes. A cramped, dark, overlooked access that runs tight against a neighbour's side wall and window is both a poor entrance to a home and a legitimate reason for the council to refuse.

The access has to work for everyday life and for the things people forget: getting a car in and out safely where parking is provided, bringing bins out to the street on collection day, emergency and refuse-vehicle access where required, and doing all of this without disturbing the neighbours whose homes the access adjoins. Where the access is shared, the legal arrangements (rights of way and maintenance) matter alongside the physical design, and a genuinely shared drive can create friction that the planning process will scrutinise. We design the access as a real, usable, neighbourly route, not an afterthought squeezed down the side of a plot.

Parking is the other half of the question, and Ealing's approach depends on where the plot is. In well-connected areas close to the many rail, Underground, Elizabeth line and bus services that serve the borough, a car-light or car-free house may be acceptable and even preferred, with the emphasis on secure cycle parking instead. In more suburban, less connected parts of the borough, the council will expect appropriate off-street parking, and a scheme that displaces parking onto already pressured streets, or that leaves the existing house without adequate parking after subdivision, will struggle. The parking case has to be tailored to the specific location.

We resolve access and parking on the drawings from the outset, because these are exactly the practical issues that objectors raise and case officers test. A workable, safe, well-designed access and a credible parking and cycle-storage strategy remove two of the most common reasons garden schemes are refused, and they demonstrate that the scheme has been thought through as a place people will actually live, arrive at and leave every day.

Gardens are green, and that green is both an asset the council protects and a set of technical constraints the scheme has to resolve. Trees come first. Mature trees are a defining feature of Ealing's garden-rich character, and many are protected — by Tree Preservation Orders, or automatically where the plot is in a conservation area, which covers a great deal of the borough. The council will resist the loss of important trees to make way for a house, and it assesses the impact of a new dwelling on trees both on the plot and on neighbouring land. A scheme that requires felling a fine tree, or that puts a house so close to a retained tree that the two cannot coexist, is heading for refusal.

A proper arboricultural approach is therefore part of designing a garden house. We survey the trees, identify which are protected and which are worth retaining, map their root protection areas, and design the house and its foundations to sit outside those areas and to avoid harming the trees during construction. Where trees are close, foundation design (often specialised foundations that avoid disturbing roots and account for clay shrinkage near trees) becomes a structural as well as an arboricultural question, which is exactly the kind of thing our integrated architecture-and-structure team resolves in one go.

Drainage is the other green-plot issue. Building a house on garden land replaces permeable ground — lawn and planting that absorbs rain — with roofs and hard surfaces that shed it, and the surface water has to go somewhere. The scheme has to demonstrate that it will not increase flood risk on the plot or to neighbours, which means a proper surface-water drainage strategy. Sustainable drainage systems (SuDS) — permeable paving, soakaways, rain gardens, attenuation and green roofs — are the expected approach, managing rainwater on the plot and mimicking the natural drainage the garden used to provide.

None of this is optional detail; trees and drainage are frequent, decisive issues on garden applications, and they are far cheaper to design around than to fix after an objection. We coordinate the arboricultural strategy, the drainage strategy and the structural design with the house layout from the start, so the house sits comfortably among the trees it keeps and deals responsibly with the water it sheds — and so the application answers the tree and drainage tests before the council or the neighbours can raise them.

A new house in a garden is a complete new building, and the structural design is a real engineering exercise, not an afterthought to the planning drawings. Crown handles the architecture, the structure and the building services together, so the house you get permission for is one we know can actually be built on that plot — which matters more on constrained garden sites than almost anywhere, because the ground conditions, the trees and the access all bear directly on the structure.

Foundations are the first question, and garden plots throw up specific issues. Much of west London sits on London Clay, a shrinkable soil that moves with moisture and, critically, is affected by nearby trees, which draw water from the ground. A house built near retained trees on clay needs foundations designed for that condition — typically deeper foundations, or piled foundations, sized for the influence of the trees and the clay's shrink-swell behaviour. The ground has to be investigated (trial pits or boreholes and soil testing) so the foundations are designed for what is actually there, not assumed. On backland plots there is the added practical problem of getting foundation plant and materials down a narrow access, which shapes the buildable construction method.

Above the foundations, the superstructure has to be designed as a coherent whole: the loadbearing walls or frame, the floor and roof structure, lateral stability, and the way loads travel down to the foundations. A garden house can be built in masonry, in a timber frame, in steel or in a hybrid, and the right choice depends on the plot, the access, the ground and the architecture. Where the access is tight, a lighter or more prefabricated structure that can be delivered in manageable pieces may be the sensible answer — another reason to design the structure and the construction method alongside the architecture, not after it.

Because we design the structure in-house alongside the architecture, the planning drawings are structurally deliverable from the outset — the spans work, the foundations suit the ground and the trees, and the construction method suits the access. That integration avoids the classic problem of a beautiful planning permission for a house that then proves difficult or disproportionately expensive to build on its awkward plot, and it means the move from consent to a full set of building-regulations and construction drawings is smooth rather than a redesign.

A new house needs a full set of building services — heating, hot water, ventilation, electricity, water supply, foul and surface-water drainage, and increasingly renewable generation — and providing all of them to a plot that has never been a separate home is more involved than owners expect. We design the services as part of the same coordinated package as the architecture and structure, so the house is not just consentable and buildable but genuinely serviceable.

Utilities connections are the first practical hurdle on a garden plot. A new dwelling needs its own connections to water, electricity, drainage and (where relevant) telecoms, and on a backland or infill plot those connections may have to be routed a considerable distance from the street, through or around the existing house and garden, and coordinated with the utility companies. Foul drainage in particular can be awkward: connecting the new house to the public sewer may require running a new drain across the plot, negotiating levels, and sometimes a pumped solution where gravity drainage is not possible. These are exactly the issues that stall a build if they are not designed and priced early.

Inside the house, the services follow modern low-carbon design. New homes are moving decisively away from gas: the direction of national policy (see the energy section below) points to heat pumps as the primary heating and hot-water source for new dwellings, with mechanical ventilation with heat recovery to keep a well-sealed, well-insulated house healthy, and solar photovoltaic generation on the roof. Designing these systems in from the start — with space for a heat pump and a hot-water cylinder, sensible pipe and duct runs, and a roof oriented to take PV — is far easier than retrofitting them into a layout fixed without them.

Coordinating the services with the architecture and structure is what stops the classic new-build problems: a plant cupboard that does not fit, a drain that clashes with a foundation, a duct route that was never allowed for. Because Crown designs all three disciplines together, the services are built into the house from the first sketch — space, routes, connections and low-carbon systems all accounted for — so the finished home works as well as it looks, and the construction runs without the expensive surprises that come from bolting services on at the end.

A whole new dwelling has to meet the energy and carbon requirements of the Building Regulations, and these are tightening sharply. Part L (conservation of fuel and power) governs the energy performance of new homes, and compliance is demonstrated through an energy calculation (the SAP methodology) that models the fabric, the heating and hot-water systems, ventilation and any renewable generation to show the house meets the required carbon-emission and fabric-efficiency targets. Every new house needs this calculation both to gain building-regulations approval and to produce its Energy Performance Certificate.

The big shift is the Future Homes Standard, the government's programme to make new homes low-carbon and 'zero-carbon ready'. It is designed to require new dwellings to produce dramatically lower carbon emissions than homes built to earlier standards — in the order of a 75 to 80 per cent reduction against the 2013 baseline — through a combination of a high-performance building fabric, low-carbon heating and on-site renewables. In practice the carbon targets are set at a level that fossil-fuel heating cannot meet, so new houses are expected to use heat pumps rather than gas boilers, together with excellent insulation and airtightness and, typically, solar PV.

The Future Homes Standard is being brought in as an update to Part L, with the technical detail and the transition dates confirmed by government through 2025 and 2026. The precise standard that applies to your house depends on when its building-regulations application is made and when it is built, so we always design to the current and imminent requirements and confirm the exact position for your project. Designing a garden house today to a Future Homes-ready specification is sensible in any case: a fabric-first, heat-pump-and-PV home is cheaper to run, more comfortable, and future-proofed against the direction of travel.

In London there is a further layer: the London Plan's own energy policy expects new homes to follow an energy hierarchy (be lean, be clean, be green, be seen) and to work towards net-zero-carbon, sometimes with a carbon-offset contribution where on-site zero carbon is not achieved. We design the energy strategy — fabric, heating, ventilation and renewables — as an integral part of the house from the first sketch, so it meets Part L and the Future Homes Standard, satisfies the London Plan, and produces a genuinely efficient home rather than a compliance afterthought.

A new house creates new floorspace, and new floorspace can attract the Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL) — a charge per square metre of net additional floorspace that funds the infrastructure needed to support development. In Ealing there are two potential CIL charges. The first is the Mayor of London's CIL, which applies across the capital to help fund strategic transport infrastructure such as the Elizabeth line. The second is the council's own borough CIL: Ealing has been implementing a new CIL charging schedule, approved by Full Council in December 2025 and taking effect from March 2026, so developments granted permission on or after that date are liable for the borough CIL as well as the Mayoral CIL.

For a single house in a garden the CIL sum is usually manageable, but it is a real cost that has to be budgeted, and it turns on the net new floorspace created — the gross internal area of the new house, with an allowance for any existing floorspace that qualifies for offset. Because CIL is calculated from the floor areas and the applicable rates, getting the areas right on the drawings and understanding which rates apply is part of giving you an accurate picture of the project cost. We flag the likely CIL position early so it is never a surprise after permission is granted.

There are also important CIL reliefs, and one is particularly relevant to garden houses. A self-build exemption is available where you are building the house to occupy as your own main home (rather than as a development for sale), which can remove the CIL liability entirely — but it must be applied for correctly, before the development commences and following the required procedure, or it is lost. If you are building a garden house to live in yourself, or for a family member under the relevant provisions, this exemption can be valuable, and we make sure the process is followed so the relief is not forfeited by a procedural slip.

Beyond CIL, larger schemes can attract planning obligations through a Section 106 agreement, though a single new house rarely triggers the affordable-housing thresholds that drive substantial obligations. Where any obligation does apply — a financial contribution, a highways work, a tree or biodiversity commitment — we identify it early and factor it into the scheme, so the full cost and the full set of requirements are understood from the outset rather than emerging late in the process.

A full planning application for a new house in a garden has to present a complete, coherent and persuasive case, and that means a properly prepared package of drawings and supporting documents. We work through the recognised RIBA project stages — from preparation and briefing, through concept design and developed design, to the technical information needed for building regulations and construction — so the project progresses in a logical, controlled way and each stage builds on the last.

The planning drawing package typically includes an accurate measured survey of the plot and its context; a site location plan and a detailed site plan showing the existing and proposed layout, the new house in its plot, the retained trees, the access, parking, cycle and bin storage and the gardens; existing and proposed floor plans of the new house with room and dwelling areas annotated against the space standards; elevations and sections showing scale, height, form and materials in relation to the neighbours; and street-scene or context drawings showing how the new house sits in the established pattern of the area. Clear, honest, well-drawn plans are the foundation of a credible garden application.

Alongside the drawings we prepare the supporting documents the scheme requires. A design and access statement explaining and justifying the design in relation to the area's character and the relevant policies is central on a garden scheme. Depending on the plot, the package may also include an arboricultural report and tree survey, a daylight and sunlight assessment where amenity impacts need to be demonstrated, a surface-water drainage strategy, a transport or access statement, a heritage statement in a conservation area, a biodiversity or ecology assessment, and a planning statement setting out how the proposal complies with Ealing's Local Plan and the London Plan policy by policy.

Everything is prepared to be internally consistent, so the areas on the plans match the schedules and the statements, the daylight assessment matches the design, the tree report matches the site plan, and the whole application tells one coherent story. A coordinated, self-consistent application is materially more likely to be approved than a set of drawings and reports that contradict each other, and it is far easier for a case officer to recommend. After permission, the same team carries the design into the detailed building-regulations and construction drawings your contractor and building control need.

The process begins with feasibility, and on a garden house this stage earns its keep more than on almost any other project. We survey the plot, establish the planning designations that apply (conservation area, Article 4 direction, TPOs, flood zones), test a realistic standards-compliant house against the actual land, assess the access, the trees, the amenity impacts and the drainage, and tell you honestly whether a new house is achievable and, if so, what size and form it could take. This is where we save you from committing to a scheme the plot cannot really support.

Because garden and backland schemes are contested, pre-application advice from Ealing is often worthwhile. A written pre-application response gives you the council's initial view on the principle of a house on your plot and on the key issues — character, amenity, access, trees — before you commit to a full application, and it lets us develop the design in the direction the council will support. On a difficult backland plot in particular, a pre-application steer can be the difference between a wasted full application and a well-targeted one.

We then prepare and submit the full planning application through the Planning Portal and manage it through validation and determination. Ealing publicises the application, neighbours and amenity bodies can comment, statutory consultees are consulted, and the case officer assesses it against the Local Plan and the London Plan. Straightforward applications may be decided by officers under delegated powers; more contentious garden and backland schemes can go to the planning committee. Throughout, we respond to the case officer, address consultee and neighbour comments, and negotiate amendments where that will secure approval rather than defend a scheme to refusal.

Once permission is granted — usually subject to conditions, which we then discharge — the project moves into building regulations and construction. The same coordinated team that secured the consent prepares the technical drawings and calculations for building control, covering structure, fire, energy, drainage and construction detail, and supports the build on site. Because we design the architecture, structure and services together from the start, the transition from planning permission to a buildable set of drawings is smooth, and the house that gets built is the house that was designed.

Understanding why garden applications fail is the best way to make sure yours does not, and in Ealing the reasons are remarkably consistent. The most common is harm to the character and appearance of the area — a cramped, over-intensive or out-of-place house that erodes the spacious, garden-rich pattern that defines the borough. Backland houses that introduce built form into the green interior of a block, and infill or side-garden houses that fill a gap too tightly and break the rhythm of the street, both fail on this ground. In conservation areas the character test is stricter still.

The second great cause of refusal is harm to residential amenity: overlooking and loss of privacy to neighbours, overshadowing and loss of light, and loss of the open outlook that surrounding homes enjoy. A house sited too close to boundaries, with windows that look into neighbours' gardens and rooms, or that casts shadow over adjoining gardens, will be refused — and neighbours, who comment on these applications in numbers, will press exactly these points. Poor amenity for the new home itself, such as a dark, single-aspect house with a token yard, is refused on the same principle.

Access, parking, trees and drainage account for most of the rest. An awkward, unsafe or unneighbourly access — especially the classic tight backland drive — is a frequent and decisive objection. Inadequate parking, or parking that harms the street or leaves the existing house short after subdivision, is another. The loss of protected or important trees, or a house crammed so close to a tree it cannot survive, will sink a scheme. And a proposal that fails to show how it will manage surface water without increasing flood risk invites refusal on drainage grounds. These are avoidable failures, addressed by designing around each issue up front.

Our approach is to anticipate every one of these reasons and answer it in the application itself: a house designed to the character and grain of the area, sited and detailed to protect every neighbour's amenity, served by a genuinely workable access and parking, respecting the trees and managing the water. Above all, we are honest at feasibility if a plot simply cannot take a house that clears these hurdles — because on garden schemes there is no value whatsoever in submitting an application designed to fail.

To make the process concrete, consider a common Ealing scenario: a family owns a substantial interwar house on a generous corner plot in a well-connected part of the borough, with a wide side garden that fronts a side road. They wonder whether that side garden could carry a new house. It is exactly the kind of plot where an infill scheme can work — a house fronting the side road, completing the street rather than intruding behind it — but whether it works depends entirely on what the plot and the policies can actually support.

At feasibility, we establish the fundamentals first: the plot is not in a conservation area and carries no Article 4 direction, so the character test, while real, is the ordinary Local Plan one; there are no protected trees in the way; and the side garden is wide enough that a house could front the side road while leaving both the existing house and the new one with proper gardens and parking. We then test a realistic, standards-compliant house — a two-bedroom, dual-aspect home meeting the nationally described space standard, the London Plan ceiling heights and the required private amenity space — against the actual land, and confirm the plot can hold it comfortably with genuine spacing to every boundary. The design follows that test, not the other way round.

The design then answers the character and amenity questions deliberately. The new house takes its building line, height, roof form and materials from its neighbours, so it reads as a natural part of the street rather than a squeezed-in addition; the spacing between the new and existing houses maintains the rhythm of the area; upper windows are positioned and, where needed, obscured or set high to avoid overlooking neighbouring gardens; and each house keeps a proper private garden. A safe access and off-street parking are designed in for both homes, along with cycle and bin storage, so the practical objections are answered on the drawings.

The technical design is coordinated alongside. The structure is designed for the ground conditions — foundations sized for the London Clay and any nearby trees — and for a construction method that suits the plot; the services are laid out with new utility connections, a heat pump, ventilation and solar PV; and a SuDS drainage strategy manages the surface water the new roofs and hard surfaces will shed. The energy strategy is designed to meet Part L and the Future Homes Standard from the outset.

On the application side, we submit the full package to Ealing: the survey, site and floor plans with areas annotated, elevations and street-scene drawings showing the house in context, a design and access statement making the character and amenity case, and the drainage, tree and access information the plot calls for. Because the house is properly sized, sits comfortably in the street, protects every neighbour and answers each practical issue, it goes in as an application the council can approve — and once consented, the same coordinated drawings carry it straight into building regulations and construction. That is the difference between a garden house designed to succeed and one hoped through.

The cost of getting a new house in a garden designed and consented depends on the plot and the complexity — a straightforward infill house on a clear plot is a very different exercise from a contested backland scheme requiring pre-application advice, tree and daylight assessments and a committee decision. We scope our work to your specific project and give you a clear, fixed fee for our part before any drawing work begins, so you know where you stand from the outset. We also give you an honest feasibility view first, so you are not paying for a full design on a plot that cannot take a house.

Separate from our design fee, you should budget for the council's planning application fee, which is set nationally and, for a new dwelling, is a per-dwelling charge; any pre-application advice fee if you use that service; and the technical assessments the specific plot requires — arboricultural, daylight and sunlight, drainage, transport, heritage or ecology — each of which carries its own specialist cost. Then there is the Community Infrastructure Levy: the Mayoral CIL and Ealing's borough CIL on the new floorspace, subject to any self-build exemption you qualify for and apply for correctly.

On timescales, a full planning application in Ealing is targeted for determination within roughly eight weeks for a straightforward householder-scale application, though contested garden and backland schemes — with consultation, negotiation and possibly a committee decision — often take longer. Feasibility, design and the preparation of the drawings and supporting documents add time at the front, and pre-application advice, where used, adds a few weeks but frequently saves far more by getting the scheme right first time. The build itself — a complete new house on a constrained plot — is a substantial programme in its own right.

It is worth being clear about where money is really lost on garden houses: on full applications for plots that were never going to clear the character, amenity or access hurdles; on schemes forced to the largest house the land will physically hold, which then get refused; and on permissions for houses that prove difficult and expensive to build on their awkward plots. Getting the feasibility, the design and the coordination right first time is by far the most cost-effective way to turn garden land into a home, and it is exactly what our integrated approach is built to do.

A very large part of residential Ealing is covered by special character protection — the borough has around 29 conservation areas, and several of its finest suburbs carry Article 4 directions on top. If your garden plot falls within one of these, the planning bar is higher, the character and heritage tests are stronger, and the presumption against harmful backland and garden development is more pronounced. Establishing exactly which designations cover your plot is the first thing we check, because it changes what is achievable and how the application has to be made.

In a conservation area, the council must pay special attention to preserving or enhancing the character or appearance of the area, and the loss of garden land or the introduction of an out-of-keeping house can be found to cause harm that the scheme has to justify. Trees in a conservation area enjoy automatic protection, so felling to make way for a house is tightly controlled. The green, spacious interiors of blocks and the established building lines and spacing are often exactly the features the designation protects — which is precisely what a backland or infill house can threaten.

Brentham Garden Suburb is the clearest case. As an early and influential planned garden suburb, it is a conservation area with a comprehensive Article 4 direction that removes virtually all permitted development rights, and applications there are judged against a detailed conservation-area design guide. The whole point of Brentham is houses set in generous greenery as a deliberate design principle, so garden development that erodes that setting faces a very strong presumption against it. Similar care applies across the borough's other protected suburbs and Edwardian and Victorian conservation areas.

None of this makes a garden house in a sensitive area impossible, but it does raise the design bar and make honest, early advice essential. A scheme in a conservation area has to be conceived from the outset as a piece of design that preserves or enhances the area's character — the right scale, form, materials and, above all, the right relationship to the garden setting — supported by a proper heritage assessment. We tell you plainly whether your plot's designations make a house realistic, and if they do, we design to clear the higher bar those designations set.

Crown Architecture designs new houses in gardens across Ealing and the surrounding boroughs, and we do it as a single coordinated service: the planning design, the structural engineering and the building services under one roof. That integration matters more on a new house than on almost any other project, because a whole new dwelling on a constrained garden plot is where architecture, structure, drainage, trees and services are most tightly interdependent — design them separately and they clash on the plot; design them together and the house you get permission for is genuinely buildable.

We know the Ealing context specifically: the borough's spacious, garden-rich character and why the council protects it; the garden-grabbing policy that took gardens out of brownfield land; the way backland and infill schemes are judged on character, amenity, access, trees and drainage; the conservation areas and Article 4 directions that cover so much of residential Ealing, Brentham foremost among them; and the space, energy and levy standards a new house has to meet. We use that knowledge to give you honest feasibility advice — whether your plot can take a house at all, and if so what house — before you commit a penny to a full design.

Just as importantly, we are straightforward to work with. We tell you early and plainly whether a garden house is realistic on your plot, we quote a clear fixed fee, and we prepare a coordinated, self-consistent application that a case officer can approve without having to fill in the gaps. We lead with the character and amenity case that Ealing's policies demand, and we answer the access, tree and drainage issues that so often sink garden schemes, on the drawings, before they become objections.

We also stay with the project after the drawings are done. We manage the application through Ealing's determination — including pre-application advice and, where a scheme goes to committee, the committee process — respond to the case officer and to neighbours, negotiate where that will secure approval, and once consent is granted carry the scheme through the discharge of conditions and into the building-regulations and construction information your contractor and building control need. The aim is a single, accountable point of contact from the first survey to a finished, well-built home.

If you are thinking about building a new house in a garden in Ealing — whether it is a wide side garden, a deep back garden, an infill plot or the subdivision of a large plot — send us the address and what you have in mind, and we will tell you honestly whether it is achievable and what is realistic, and how to get there.