Design Guide for Rural Northern Ireland
Finding the Right Site: Examples of Good and Bad Siting

The setting of a building affects its appearance and visual impact. One of the least satisfactory aspects of much recent development in the countryside has been the use of road frontage sites, often separated out of larger fields. Here buildings dominate the view and incongruous suburban gardens are introduced into the landscape. Such development changes the character of the countryside and when repeated leads to ribbon development, and a loss of rural amenity.

Your designer should carry out a thorough check for possible problems. For example, the access to a seemingly attractive site may result in the removal of all the roadside hedges and trees. This might expose the new building as a prominent development, unlikely to gain planning permission.

In many cases the obvious solution is to develop further back from the road enabling the building and its garden to be surrounded and absorbed by the rural landscape. Planting can be used to separate a site from the countryside and from the road frontage.