Traditionally, if you wanted to create your own house, you first needed to find a good plot of land, commission a bespoke design, work out how to get services to the site, seek planning permission and secure Building Regulations approval. Getting to this stage involves a lot of time, effort and expenditure – and that’s before you’ve even brought in the builders to do the actual construction work
It’s all worth it, of course: get it right and you’ll end up with a high-quality bespoke home that’s perfectly in tune with your lifestyle and represents excellent value for money. But wouldn’t it be great if the process was a little easier to manage? Well, the good news is that in recent years a number of new routes have opened up that are taking some of the complexity out of the process, providing a more hands-off route to finding a viable plot and creating a tailor-made house.
These approaches are known collectively as ‘custom build’; the idea being that this term emphasises what you’re getting is choice, control and quality, but without some of the stresses of a traditional self build. There’s a range of options – but we can loosely group them into two main offerings: blank enabled plots with planning and utilities in place; and schemes where you buy the land and some or all of the structural works in one package.