Design Guide for Rural Northern Ireland (Summary)
Scheme Design

Your designer must produce a scheme which meets your needs and also fulfils the planning requirements.

Skilled design will produce a scheme which suits you and gets the best out of the site. By contrast, the common practice of dropping a standard house on to a site is poor design and fails to exploit the potential of the site. In contrast, a careful site analysis of the existing features in the landscape will indicate possible positions for entrances, gardens, garages and particular rooms

A major aspect of designing a rural house is the development pattern, which is fundamental to the integration of the finished scheme in the landscape. This should reflect the character of the locality, and it is important to distinguish between rural character and suburban character. The rural pattern is one of buildings surrounded by land, with the buildings always subservient to the landscape, whereas the suburban pattern is of buildings occupying strips of land, having front and back gardens, with buildings forming the dominant image. One of the most destructive design mistakes in recent time has been the attempt to implant the suburban model in the rural scene. This is a basic miss-match and must be avoided.