Hearth House: One of the First Homes Approved Under Policy HO11
Updated: 5 days ago
Introduction
On 17th August 2026, a new National Planning Policy Framework took effect. Paragraph 84(e), the long-standing route to permission for an isolated home of exceptional design quality in the countryside, became Policy HO11(e).
Fifteen days later, on 1st September 2026, Wealden District Council granted planning permission under delegated powers for Hearth House: a new home for three generations of one family on land at North Clays Farm, Hartfield, in the High Weald National Landscape. It may be the first home in England to be approved under Policy HO11.
The application, reference WD/2025/2842/F, was submitted in December 2025 under Paragraph 84(e) and decided under HO11. Before it was submitted, The Design Review Panel (www.designreviewpanel.co.uk) reviewed the scheme three times: in person with a site visit on 30th January 2025, online on 13th May 2025, and as a desktop review on 15th July 2025. All three of the Panel's reports accompanied the application, and the officer report draws on each of them.
Whilst the NPPF policy has a new number, the test and very high bar has not changed.
For architects, applicants and local planning authorities asking how the exceptional-quality route behaves under the 2026 Framework, Hearth House is one of the earliest answers on the public record.
What Policy HO11 Requires
Planning policy as at 5 October 2026.
The 2026 Framework separates plan-making from a set of national decision-making policies, each identified by a code rather than a paragraph number. Policy HO11 governs isolated homes in the countryside. It provides that proposals for such homes should only be supported where one or more of five circumstances apply. The fifth is the exceptional-quality route:
"e. The design is of exceptional quality, in that it: i. Is truly outstanding, reflecting the highest standards in architecture, and would help to raise standards of design more generally in rural areas; and ii. Would significantly enhance its immediate setting, and be sensitive to the defining characteristics of the local area." — National Planning Policy Framework (2026), Policy HO11
The two-limb test is carried forward word for word from Paragraph 84(e) of the December 2024 Framework. The sentence around it is recast as a decision-making policy: where the 2024 text said that planning policies and decisions should avoid isolated homes unless one of the circumstances applies, HO11 says that proposals should only be supported where one does.
The limbs are cumulative. A proposal must show that its architecture is truly outstanding and that it significantly enhances its immediate setting. In a designated landscape the second limb is harder still; the Hearth House officer report notes that the challenge of assimilating an outstanding house into its surroundings "is heightened when the site lies within a National Landscape".
The statutory duty under section 85 of the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000, as amended by the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act 2023, to seek to further the purpose of conserving and enhancing the natural beauty of the area reinforces the point.
Neither limb is met by assertion. Both are met, if at all, by evidence.
The Site
North Clays Farm lies off Butcherfield Lane in Hartfield parish, in the Wealden district of East Sussex, about a mile and a half from the villages of Hartfield and Ashurst Wood. The application site is an undeveloped agricultural field in the High Weald National Landscape. The officer report describes it as having "a tranquil and remote character that is typical of the undeveloped parts of the High Weald National Landscape".
Its neighbours are historic. North Clays Farmhouse, listed at Grade II, stands about 365 metres to the south-west. To the north lies Tugmore Shaw, an ancient semi-natural woodland whose iron minepits are a Scheduled Monument.
The design team framed its task plainly. The challenge, in its own words, was "how to assimilate the narrative of a truly outstanding dwelling into a sensitive landscape".
A Landscape Shaped by Iron
The organising idea of Hearth House lies in the ground beneath it. The design team's research traces the Weald as Britain's main iron-producing region in two periods: the first two centuries of the Roman occupation, and the Tudor and early Stuart eras. Local sands and clays yielded iron ore, together with the stone and brick used to build the blast furnaces that smelted it. The woodlands supplied charcoal. Water wheels beside the furnaces drove the bellows and hammers.
The evidence is close at hand: the minepits in the woodland beside the site are protected as a Scheduled Monument. Across the Weald, the forges and furnaces themselves have gone, but their traces remain in the landscape and in its place names. Drawings of the buildings are rare. The few that survive describe a consistent type: a tall central brick furnace tower, with subservient lightweight timber lean-tos around it.
That type becomes the basis of the house.
The Proposal
Hearth House is designed by McLean Quinlan as a model for multigenerational living. Three generations of one family share a single home, arranged as four distinct volumes around a central hearth. Accommodation rises over four floors in parts, including an integrated annexe, with four bedrooms in total and a detached garage and garden store.
The form follows the furnace. A tall brick core rises at the centre, framed by simple lean-to roofs adapted to bring in light, open up views and organise movement through the house. The tower is deliberately coloured: its long-format, clay-red brick expresses the hues of the iron ore held in the ground and once mined close by. Perforations in the upper brickwork allow the top of the tower to be lit from within, a reference to hot embers rising from a furnace.
The surrounding volumes are clad in dark, weathered timber. The design team relates this to the charcoal once found at the base of every furnace, and to the dark woodland behind the site. The timber recedes so that the tower leads.
The environmental strategy is fabric first. The house is oriented for solar gain, with overhanging roofs to shade it in summer, and the design team proposes an integrated photovoltaic array, a heat pump, triple glazing and high-performance insulation to minimise energy demand, with rainwater harvesting and sustainable drainage to reduce water use. The officer report notes a proposed low-carbon concrete made with ground granulated blast-furnace slag, "a rather fitting material given the design ethos of the dwelling".
In the design team's words, the house is "designed to be as adaptable as it is sustainable, built to serve generations to come."
Landscape Strategy: Water, Meadow and Orchard
The landscape proposals, developed with David Jarvis Associates, carry the furnace idea into the ground. The annotations on the masterplan record how the scheme moves during design development. The pond is repositioned "to maximise the sloping topography". A swale now runs perpendicular to the furnace tower: historic furnaces depended on a nearby water source to power their hammers and bellows, and here the water source becomes a swale that carries run-off away from the house and down the site. Wildflower meadows and pockets of native planting take their shapes from Tugmore Shaw. The driveway is reworked so that vehicles can turn more easily.
The officer report reads the same features as part of the case under HO11(e). New earthworks create undulations "reminiscent of the man-made changes in the topography brought about by the digging of marl pits and iron ore pits". The swales replicate the water sources that once served the furnaces of the High Weald, and are integrated into a new pond. An information board, secured by condition, helps to reveal the history of the place.
The scheme also delivers measurable gains. The officer report records a 58.85% increase in habitat units and a 2,332.53% increase in hedgerow units, against a 10% minimum for biodiversity net gain, and a Landscape and Visual Impact Assessment that predicts a "moderate beneficial" overall effect on the National Landscape.
The second limb of HO11(e) asks whether a proposal would significantly enhance its immediate setting. At Hearth House, the answer lies in water, meadow and orchard as much as in brick and timber.
Independent Design Review: Three Reviews Before Submission
The Design Review Panel reviewed Hearth House three times before the application was submitted. The first review, on 30th January 2025, took place in person and incorporated a site visit. The second, on 13th May 2025, was held online. The third, on 15th July 2025, was a desktop review of the revised material. All three of the Panel's reports accompanied the planning application as shown on the council's planning register.
The Design Review Panel (www.designreviewpanel.co.uk) is a national, independent and multidisciplinary design review service, separate from applicants, design teams and local planning authorities. Its members are expert volunteers selected for their relevance to each scheme, and the volunteer structure helps keep any commercial incentive out of its feedback.
The officer report opens its account of the reviews with a general observation: "As is common with houses presented under Policy HO11, the proposal has been subjected to three rounds of assessment with a Design Review Panel (DRP)." It then sets out what each review contributed, quoting the Panel's reports.
At the first review, the Panel recognised that Tugmore Shaw would once have been a much busier place than it is now, and frames the challenge as how to "evoke the former in a way which respects the latter". It asks for the "interface" between house and woodland to be resolved, including a clear line for the residential curtilage. The officer report notes the "somewhat unusual position" the Panel took on the architecture: rather than restraining the scheme, it encouraged a more "adventurous" approach, with a taller, more imposing tower. The long-format red clay brick is welcomed as a way to "anchor the building in the landscape".
By the second review, the Panel found that the scheme had responded positively and would "undoubtedly significantly enhance the site and its surroundings". It was particularly impressed by the articulation of the tower and its link to the hearth concept, and described the swale, which "mimics the watercourses used to power the historical furnaces in the area", as a "lovely idea and one elevated further" by the planting. The lean-to volumes that now define the house begin here, as the Panel's suggestion for evolving what were then a series of supporting buildings.
At the third review, the Panel found that the latest amendments had achieved a "richness, depth and maturity" of design. The officer report records the Panel's view that the scheme now meets the exceptional-quality test, with the refinement of the lean-tos welcomed and the landscape-led approach regarded as exemplary.
Exceptional quality is rarely reached in a single iteration. The Panel's role is to help interrogate, not to validate. Here, that interrogation made the scheme bolder, not smaller.
The design team's account of the process is direct:
"The valuable insight and constructive feedback provided by the panel members enabled the design team to further articulate the design vision while refining the detail and quality of the proposal."
Determination Under Policy HO11
The application was received on 16th December 2025 and validated on 9th January 2026. It is described on the council's register as the "erection of new dwelling of exceptional quality and design and landscape enhancements (Paragraph 84E) and associated works", and the officer report notes that it is presented within the terms of Paragraph 84(e) of the previous Framework. It is decided under its successor.
The officer report describes the support offered by Policy HO11 as "an extremely high threshold to meet", and then works through both limbs.
On the first limb, it concludes: "It is therefore clear the design is truly outstanding and would help to raise standards of rural design by acting as an exemplar for how to successfully weave competing architectural, landscape and heritage elements into new built form."
On the second, it finds that the proposal "would be an enhancement of its immediate setting and that of the wider HWNL", that it meets the second limb of HO11 in full, and that it "clearly exceeds the requirements of DP3 of the Framework".
Permission was granted under delegated powers on 1st September 2026, fifteen days after the new Framework took effect. There is no committee resolution and no appeal.
The case was prepared under one Framework and decided under another.
The officer report's summary of the design returns to the challenge the design team set itself, in the team's own words:
"On the whole, it is the view of Officers that the proposed dwelling successfully achieves that most difficult of design quandaries – how to assimilate the narrative of a truly outstanding dwelling into a sensitive landscape, through a combination of its design and architectural approach, materiality and invocation of historical industrial activity that results in a quite remarkable structure which would simultaneously sit at ease within its setting." — Delegated officer report, Wealden District Council, 1st September 2026
The question is the design team's. The answer is the council's.
Policies DP3 and DP4: Design Review Under the 2026 Framework
The 2026 Framework keeps a clear role for design review. Policy DP4, on the design process, asks local planning authorities to ensure that they have access to, and encourage the appropriate use of, design review and other design tools and processes, and to "take into account their outcomes". The Hearth House officer report applies the policy directly: "LPAs are instructed to have regard to the findings of DRPs under Policy DP4 of the NPPF."
Policy DP3 goes further on the weight given to outstanding design. Where paragraph 139 of the December 2024 Framework called for significant weight, DP3 now provides that "substantial weight should also be given to outstanding or innovative designs" which promote high levels of sustainability, or which help raise the standard of design more generally in an area, so long as they are consistent with the overall form and layout of their surroundings.
Taken together, the two policies describe the role Hearth House illustrates: independent review engaged early, recorded clearly, published with the application and carried through to the decision.
What Hearth House Demonstrates
Hearth House joins the exceptional-quality casework in the Panel's published record, including Tunwold, Chadlington and Spilsby House, East Devon. Those schemes reach consent by harder routes, through refusal and appeal. Hearth House reaches it by delegated decision, under a policy that was not yet in force when its reviews took place.
Three lessons travel beyond this case:
Continuity. HO11(e) carries forward the wording of Paragraph 84(e). Evidence prepared against the old paragraph remains directly relevant to a decision under the new policy. For schemes already in preparation, that continuity matters.
Sequence. All three reviews took place before submission, while the design was still fluid. The taller tower and the lean-to volumes both trace back to points raised in design review panel sessions.
Transparency. The Panel's reports were submitted with the planning application, and the officer report quotes them. A decision on a policy that turns on judgement is stronger where that judgement has been tested independently, on the record.
What This Means for You
Conclusion
Hearth House is a house about inheritance: of a family across three generations, and of a landscape that was once Britain's principal source of iron. It is also one of the first homes in England to be approved under NPPF Policy HO11, and its route to permission is instructive: three independent reviews before submission, a design idea strong enough to grow under scrutiny, and a delegated decision fifteen days after the new policy took effect.
For anyone preparing an exceptional-quality home under the 2026 Framework, the lesson is familiar from Paragraph 84(e): early engagement, rigorous scrutiny and a clear record give an exceptional-quality claim firm footing.
Policy HO11 does not yield to opinion. It yields to evidence. Hearth House is the evidence.
About The Design Review Panel
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Policy HO11 of the National Planning Policy Framework?
Policy HO11 is the national decision-making policy on isolated homes in the countryside in the National Planning Policy Framework that took effect on 17 August 2026. It provides that proposals for isolated homes should only be supported where one or more listed circumstances apply, including, at HO11(e), a design of exceptional quality.
Has Paragraph 84(e) been replaced?
Yes. In the 2026 Framework, the exceptional-quality route formerly set out in Paragraph 84(e) of the December 2024 edition appears as Policy HO11(e). The wording of its two-limb test is carried forward unchanged.
What does Policy HO11(e) require?
The design must be of exceptional quality. It must be truly outstanding, reflecting the highest standards in architecture and helping to raise standards of design more generally in rural areas, and it must significantly enhance its immediate setting while being sensitive to the defining characteristics of the local area. Both limbs must be met.
When was Hearth House approved, and how?
Wealden District Council granted planning permission for application WD/2025/2842/F on 1 September 2026, under delegated powers, fifteen days after the new Framework took effect. The application was submitted under Paragraph 84(e) and determined under Policy HO11.
How many times did The Design Review Panel review Hearth House?
Three times before the application was submitted: in person with a site visit on 30 January 2025, online on 13 May 2025 and as a desktop review on 15 July 2025. All three of the Panel's reports accompany the application.
Did the officer report refer to the design review?
Yes. The delegated officer report summarises all three reviews, quotes the Panel's reports and notes that local planning authorities are instructed to have regard to the findings of design review panels under Policy DP4 of the National Planning Policy Framework.
What does the 2026 Framework say about design review?
Policy DP4 asks local planning authorities to ensure that they have access to design review, to encourage its appropriate use and to take its outcomes into account. Policy DP3 provides that substantial weight should be given to outstanding or innovative designs that promote high levels of sustainability or help raise the standard of design in an area.
What is the Wealden iron industry, and why does it matter to Hearth House?
The Weald was Britain's main iron-producing region during the Roman occupation and again in the Tudor and early Stuart eras, using local ore, charcoal from its woodlands and water power. Hearth House takes its form from the region's blast furnaces, and the iron minepits in the neighbouring woodland are a Scheduled Monument.
Is The Design Review Panel independent of local planning authorities?
Yes. The Panel is a national, independent, multidisciplinary design review service, separate from applicants, design teams and local planning authorities. Its feedback reflects the professional judgement of its members and is not directed by any local planning authority.
How can applicants engage The Design Review Panel?
Applicants, architects and planning consultants can request a review through www.designreviewpanel.co.uk. Engagement is most effective when it is early and iterative, so that the review can shape the proposal rather than describe it.
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