Building blemishes on our landscape

DRIVING about our lovely country we couldn’t but notice a high percentage of houses built in the heart of the country in recent decades are out of keeping with their surroundings like a bum note in a symphony.

How they got planning permission beggars belief. Despite such publications as The Cork Rural Design Guide, showing what is and what is not acceptable, and An Atlas of the Irish Rural Landscape illustrating traditional styles, extraordinary concoctions of houses continue to blight the beauty of Ireland, while fine, old houses and outbuildings are let go to rack and ruin.

I do not expect every new house to look like the one mouldering in the farmyard alongside it and I am all for individual expression in architecture, but surely there should be a modicum of compatibility.

Beauty, we know, is in the eye of the beholder but how a confection with Swiss-cottage dormers, lacy woodwork over the eaves, various walls stone-faced, weather-slated and plastered and painted pink, plastic Georgian town-house doors, Tudor leading stuck on the windows and concrete Doric columns holding up the porch can appear beautiful to anyone is a mystery.

While it is surely a testament to the robust diversity of tastes alive and well in our democratic republic, it is reprehensible that planners should allow such concoctions to blot the legendary landscape that belongs to us all. Is it their own taste, or can’t they see the difference?

Guidelines do exist, and some planners express impeccable taste. In the Cork County Council publication, The Cork Rural Design Guide: Building a New House in the Countryside, architects in the planning department present plans of many house types, from contemporary and innovative to traditional.

Every aspect of house design and landscaping is dealt with in this richly illustrated work. Inappropriate house designs and styles of doors, windows, roofs, chimneys, etcetera, have a big “X” on the illustration; the appropriate ones, a “tick”.

Yet every time I drive in the Cork countryside I see five new “X” houses for every new “tick” house. What is happening?

I’ve long since thought there should be a website where photos of these aberrations in the national landscape could be posted with the name of the county, and no more, beneath. “Paragons of Planning” or “Holy Moses!” it might be called. If a house posted on the site didn’t deserve it, this would be obvious but, meanwhile, those outstanding in their conflict with the natural surroundings or eminent for their ugliness would become famous, along with the country planning authority that permitted them. They would be exemplars of what we shouldn’t allow architects or planning departments do to the beauty of this land.

Speaking of our rural heritage, the countryside happily retains many fine old farmhouses that marry seamlessly with the landscape and enhance it. They are spic-and-span and often re-roofed. Many are modernised inside but retain the original features.

A recent Heritage Council booklet, Traditional Buildings On Irish Farms, draws attention to the historical and aesthetic value of rural homesteads and urges their conservation. It emphasises the importance of the outbuildings, often older than the dwelling itself, and provides realistic guidelines on how to go about conserving not only the old dwelling but the buildings around the yard.

Grants of up to €25,000 are available under REPS 4 for conservation of farm buildings, administered by The Heritage Council.

Meanwhile, if they are building a new house for themselves, or talking to the jackeen who’s bought a site down the road, they might consult the books mentioned above and call the planners to task if they are ignoring their own rules.