Green Gate Barns is a redundant steel-framed farm barn on the rural edge of Earlswood, Solihull, converted into two homes for a private client: a five-bedroom house of 260.9 sqm and a three-bedroom house of 137.7 sqm, 398.6 sqm in all, with nothing added outside the original shell. The barn had stood empty for years: a steel portal frame with corrugated sheet on three sides and one long side open to the weather.

We took the Class Q prior approval route rather than a full planning application and secured approval in 43 days in August 2022. The frame and profile are kept and the openings held to what the rules allow, so the difficulty sits in the plan and the section rather than the elevations; the two homes have their own front doors on opposite sides of the building.

We worked from RIBA Stage 0 to Stage 4 and acted as agent on the prior notification; the structural survey was by others. Both homes are complete and occupied. The two main images are visualisations of the scheme as consented, based on visualisations by others, not photographs; the photograph shows the barn before conversion and the drawings are ours.