A project to transform a tumbledown farm building near Sidmouth into a modern home has been turned down.
Members of East Devon District Council’s planning committee decided by a margin of a single vote to reject the plan for the redundant barn at Burnthouse Cottage in Northmostown.
Chair Cllr Eileen Wragg (Lib Dem, Exmouth Town) warned that allowing the development would ‘open the floodgates’ for similar proposals, but Cllr Ian Barlow (Ind, Sidmouth Town) said the building could be lost forever if it was not developed.
“This is the building’s last chance,” he said.
Clinton Devon Estates had applied to convert the barn into a three-bedroom home with a substantial rear extension, parking and landscaping.
Council officers said it would be a ‘substantial and unsympathetic alteration’ and added: “The development would undermine the agricultural character of the barn, cause visual harm to the nationally protected landscape, and fail to conserve the setting of nearby listed buildings.”
The local ward councillor supported the application, as did the parish council, while two letters of objection were received.
“If we leave the building it will deteriorate and be lost forever,” said Cllr Barlow. “It is important to protect our heritage, but if we don’t do something with that building it will be lost.
“It is a proper small farmstead in a sunken area, and there aren’t many of them left.”
Cllr Wragg, however, said the plan would double the size of the existing building on an elevated site.
“This is like a little oasis,” she said. “If we allow this development, which would go against our own policies and the National Planning Policy Framework, it could really open the floodgates.
“It’s not that nothing can be done with this – but this isn’t the right application for it.”
Cllr Olly Davey (Green, Exmouth Town) said the proposal was neither sympathetic nor sustainable. “This is just going to look like a new-build,” he said. “I don’t think it does anything for the location or the landscape.”
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