New Build Homes in London

Every new home needs full planning permission. There is no route around it through permitted development, whatever the plot, whatever the borough says about itself. That single fact decides the timeline and the budget long before a single brick goes in the ground. Sovran's planning team is built around former local authority planning officers, people who used to sit on the other side of that desk and know exactly what a case officer needs to see before they'll say yes. It shows: a 97% success rate, built up across some of the boroughs that say no the most. A realistic decision takes six to twelve months from instruction, sometimes less. Once granted, permission stands for three years.

Current Building Regulations expect considerably more of a new home than most existing houses were ever built to: a heat pump rather than a boiler, insulation and glazing performance well beyond older housing stock, provision for solar and electric vehicle charging, and, since August 2026, a measurable benefit to biodiversity on site. Sovran designs to this standard from the first drawing, so it shapes the house rather than arriving as a late correction.

On an empty plot, the first real decision Sovran's architecture team makes isn't a room, it's where north actually falls: which way a kitchen should face to catch the morning light, which side of the house should turn away from a neighbour's window rather than toward it, where the structural grid sits so a later floor doesn't force an awkward column into the middle of a living room. Sovran's architecture team makes these calls before planning is even submitted, and stays on the project through construction, so the orientation decided on paper is the one someone actually lives with every morning.

Managing a self-build yourself means finding your own architecture team, your own structural engineer, your own contractor, and it can genuinely cost less if you're willing to hold all of that together and take the hit when two of them see the drawings differently. Sovran's core service is one contract covering architecture, planning, engineering, construction and interiors, so when something falls through the gap between two disciplines, that's Sovran's problem to sort, not yours. Which route suits you comes down to how much of that coordination you actually want sitting on your own desk.

Not every ageing property has reached the end of the road. Some period homes hold enough structure and character that a full renovation reaches a better result, for less cost and less planning risk, than starting again. A new build earns a place when the existing building is genuinely limiting the plot, not simply out of fashion, and Sovran will say plainly which side of that line a property sits on before any design work begins.