One of the most persistent misunderstandings about Paragraph 84(e) of the National Planning Policy Framework is that it is primarily about architectural ambition. That if you commission a sufficiently striking building — something photographable, something that will generate column inches — the planning policy will do the rest. In my experience as a Herefordshire architect who has taken several exceptional rural dwellings through the planning process, this misreading is responsible for more failed applications than any other single factor.
Paragraph 84(e) does not reward architecture for architecture’s sake. It rewards architecture that is genuinely of its place. The policy asks whether a building significantly enhances its immediate setting and is sensitive to the defining characteristics of the local area. Those are not aesthetic criteria. They are landscape criteria. They require you to understand a place deeply before you begin to design within it — and that understanding has to be demonstrably embedded in every decision that follows.
Longview, the Paragraph 84(e) house we are designing for private clients on Howle Hill near Ross-on-Wye, has been a lesson in the value of that approach. The design that has emerged — a pair of angular stone blocks orientated toward the north, framing a sheltered courtyard, anchored to the hillside by tapering walls that absorb into the contours — did not come from a mood board or a precedent library. It came from months of reading this particular hillside, this particular settlement, and this particular stretch of south Herefordshire landscape.
Bringing in the Landscape Architect
From the outset, I was clear with the clients that a landscape architect needed to be part of the core team, not a consultant brought in at the end to write a report. Herefordshire Council’s pre-application guidance had made the same point: landscape assessment was not just a supporting document for a Paragraph 84 application, it was the foundation of the design process itself.
We engaged Jennifer Cawood, a Chartered Member of the Landscape Institute at Aspect Landscape Planning, who carried out an initial visual landscape assessment of the site in June 2020. Jennifer has a thorough understanding of Herefordshire’s landscape character, and her involvement from this early stage proved essential in directing the subsequent design work. Her first task was not to draw anything. It was to help us understand what we were looking at.
The site sits within the Wooded Hills and Farmlands Landscape Character Type as defined by Herefordshire’s Landscape Character Assessment. That classification tells you something important: this is a landscape defined by texture, by woodland edges and agricultural fields, by the gentle rhythm of hills and hedgerows that characterises this part of the Welsh borders. It is not a dramatic landscape in the way that the Black Mountains are dramatic. Its qualities are more intimate, more layered, and require more careful reading.
The Site Within the Field
One of Jennifer’s early contributions was to help us evaluate four possible locations within the field — identified as positions A, B, C and D on the initial location plan — against a set of criteria that would ultimately determine where the building should sit. Those criteria were: maximising the distant views available from the house; minimising the visual impact of the development from the surrounding area; providing a degree of wind shelter on what is an exposed hilltop position; and making good use of the existing access from the Sharman Pitch lane at the field’s southern boundary.
Position D — situated in the northwest corner of the field — emerged as the clear choice. It does not offer quite the unimpeded panorama of some other positions within the field, but the compromise is minor and the advantages are significant. From position D, the building would not be visible from the Howle Hill settlement, nor from the Wye Valley Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, whose boundary comes within 150 metres of the site to the north. The ground also drops away to the northwest in a way that opens the view toward the Welsh Mountains and the Brecon Beacons, while the existing boundary hedge to the southwest provides natural screening from the road below.
This kind of calibrated site selection — trading a fraction of view for a substantial reduction in visual impact and a more defensible planning position — is characteristic of the Paragraph 84 process done properly. The goal is never to find the position with the best view. It is to find the position where the building can best justify its presence.
The History Beneath the Surface
Before the landscape analysis could fully inform the design, I needed to understand the history of this specific place. Howle Hill carries more history than its quiet, agricultural appearance suggests. The surrounding landscape bears the marks of extensive quarrying activity, which ran through this area for generations and shaped both the topography and the character of the settlement that grew up around it.
The quarry workers who lived on Howle Hill built their cottages in a very particular way. Cut into the hillside for shelter from the prevailing weather, facing northwest to take advantage of light and outlook, these buildings followed a consistent footprint: approximately 20 metres long by 6 metres wide. Where they occurred in clusters, they were typically arranged at right angles to each other, surrounded by native trees that had colonised the old quarry workings. This pattern — compact rectangular forms, stone construction, sheltered from the hill, framing outward views — is the vernacular of Howle Hill. It is what makes this settlement look like itself.
There is also a more ancient layer to the site’s history. To the east of the field stands Great Howle Camp, a Scheduled Ancient Monument from the Norman era. Associated with Goodrich Castle, it was used as an outlying lookout post — a vantage point from which the garrison could watch over the landscape below. The earthwork that remains is modest; self-set trees have colonised it over the centuries. But in its original form it would have been a commanding, purposeful structure on the hillside: a building that existed precisely because of its position, and whose meaning was inseparable from its view.
When I stood in the field and looked east toward the camp’s remains, something became clear. If we were going to build a house on this hill that genuinely belonged here — that earned its place in the landscape as a matter of character rather than compliance — it needed to acknowledge this tradition of purposeful, view-orientated structures. It needed to be, in its own contemporary way, a lookout.
Four Locations, One Concept
The design process for Longview formally began with what I would describe as a series of overlapping analyses: the landscape assessment, the site location study, the contextual survey of Howle Hill’s buildings and settlement pattern, and a historical study of the quarrying geography and the Norman hill fort. These were not separate exercises. They fed into each other, and out of their intersection came the concept that would become Longview.
The name itself captures the dual quality of what the project is trying to achieve. “Longview” describes the literal panorama — the view that extends on a clear day from the Malvern Hills in the east to the Welsh Mountains in the west, a sweep of fifty or sixty kilometres of border country. But it also describes a disposition: the willingness to think about the future, about sustainability, about how a building can contribute to its environment over the long term rather than simply occupying it.
From the analysis, three things became the architectural foundation of everything that followed. First, the 20 by 6 metre traditional cottage footprint would become the module from which the building’s massing was assembled. Second, the quarry cutting — the way the old quarries sheltered buildings by setting them into the hillside without burying them — would inform how the new house related to the ground. Third, the hill fort’s lookout function would determine the orientation and geometry of the plan: a building arranged not around a central living room, but around a series of carefully directed views toward the landmarks that define this landscape.
None of this had yet produced a building. But it had produced something more important: a genuine understanding of why this house should look the way it would eventually look. In the Paragraph 84 process, that understanding is not just design intelligence. It is the planning argument itself.
The Visibility Test
Before the design work could progress further, I wanted to test one fundamental question: would a building at position D, built to the height and scale we were contemplating, actually be invisible from the settlement below? In Switzerland, where one of the clients had lived for many years, there is a common practice for testing the visual impact of proposed buildings — placing poles with flags at the proposed roof corners and high points, and walking the surrounding area to see where, if anywhere, they are visible.
We adopted this technique on Howle Hill. Poles were placed in the field at the highest proposed roof points, and I walked the settlement, the surrounding lanes, and the key public viewpoints to observe them. The result was unambiguous. The flags were not visible from any vantage point within the Howle Hill settlement, from the adjacent road, or from within the AONB boundary. The established hedge on the southwestern boundary of the field was doing exactly what we hoped — screening the site from below — and the position D location was performing as the landscape assessment had predicted.
This is the kind of empirical evidence that strengthens a Paragraph 84 application considerably. It is not enough to argue that a building will be well integrated into its landscape. You have to show it — and where possible, show it through methods that a planning authority, a design panel, and ultimately a planning inspector can understand and rely upon.
The foundation was in place. The next stage was to turn this landscape intelligence into architecture.
Longview is a Paragraph 84(e) exceptional rural dwelling designed by Thomas Studio for private clients in Howle Hill, Herefordshire. The project received planning permission from Herefordshire Council in July 2023 and is currently under construction. Thomas Studio specialises in Paragraph 84(e) exceptional rural dwellings, barn conversions, and listed building projects across Herefordshire, Shropshire, Gloucestershire, and the Cotswolds. To discuss a potential project, contact Garry Thomas.