FLATS will be built within the grounds of a property in St Brelade after an initial refusal by the Planning Committee was overturned.
Dandara applied to knock down Fair Acre, towards the western end of Route Orange – which runs between Les Quennevais and La Moye – and replace it with 13 two-bedroom apartments.
This was rejected by the committee in October, whose members concluded that the development would be ‘dominant and intrusive, thereby unreasonably affecting the character and amenity of the area and the environment’.
The following month, the developer lodged an appeal, arguing that the committee had not paid ‘proper regard’ to its supporting documents included with the application and that its members had ‘misunderstood’ and ‘paid insufficient regard’ to various policies of the Bridging Island Plan, which is essentially the rulebook against which all planning decisions are judged.
The appeal was assessed by an independent inspector who ruled this month that the application did accord with enough policies of the BIP, including its identification of Les Quennevais as the Island’s ‘secondary main urban centre’.
The inspector concluded that the ‘existing house has no particular architectural or historic merit’, the number of apartments was ‘well within the capacity of the site’ and that they would be ‘set back some distance from the road, from which it would be well screened by existing trees’.
The application was approved by Assistant Environment Minister Hilary Jeune. Permission comes with an obligation for the developer to pay £33,250 to provide a bus shelter for town-bound buses and contribute towards two shelters to the east of the site.
Meanwhile, an appeal against the refusal of another demolition and rebuild on Route Orange was rejected.
In late 2021, plans were submitted to knock down a large bungalow called Melrose and various outbuildings by the entrance to La Moye Golf Club and replace them with seven four-bedroom and four three-bedroom homes.
This was rejected by the Planning Committee last September, a decision that was recently upheld by an independent inspector, primarily on the basis that the development would have an unreasonable impact on the privacy of a neighbouring property.
