House design guide
What Laois wants your home to look like
Laois County Council wants rural homes to blend seamlessly into the countryside by being simple, compact, and respectful of local landscape features. New houses should use traditional narrow rectangular shapes and natural materials, while carefully preserving existing trees, hedges, and stone walls rather than copying suburban layouts.
Accepted house types & forms
What they want to see
Encouraged by the guide
Employ a qualified designer(Page 4, 24)
Applicants are strongly advised to hire a qualified architect or designer early on to choose the right site and create a design that integrates with the rural context.
Design narrow, rectangular layouts(Page 10, 17, 19, 26)
A simple rectangular layout with a narrow depth matches traditional Irish rural housing, adapts well to slopes, and reduces heat loss when oriented south.
Retain existing landscape features(Page 6, 9, 16, 26)
Keep all existing mature trees, hedgerows, stone walls, and natural slope contours to help absorb the building into its landscape.
Use native planting species(Page 16, 24)
Incorporate local native species (like Whitethorn, Blackthorn, Rowan, and Oak) for any new gardens, boundary hedges, or shelter belts.
Subservient extensions and garages(Page 15, 21)
Ensure that any outbuildings, garages, or extensions are clearly secondary (subservient) to the main house in size, scale, and materials.
What gets refused
Discouraged by the guide
Ribbon development(Page 6, 7, 25)
Avoid adding to or creating ribbon development, which is defined as five or more houses on either side of 250 meters of road frontage.
Building on exposed hilltops or ridgelines(Page 6, 25)
Avoid locating houses on highly visible sites such as hilltops, ridgelines, or open floodplains where they will break the skyline and look visually intrusive.
Pattern-book and imitation styles(Page 17, 19, 26)
Do not use 'off-the-shelf' suburban styles or historical mimicry, such as mock-Georgian porticos, medieval leaded windows, log cabins, chalets, or haciendas.
Predominant use of artificial materials(Page 20, 26)
Avoid using PVC doors, windows, eaves, plastic weatherboarding, concrete roof tiles, and fiber-cement slates.
Over-complicated roof shapes and features(Page 19, 26)
Avoid boxed verges, overhanging/oversailing roof edges, irregular dormers, and elaborate protruding bay windows.
Suburban-style boundaries and frontage parking(Page 15, 26)
Avoid concrete block walls, ranch-type fences, fast-growing conifers, and large open tarmac parking areas directly at the front of the house.
Materials & finishes
- Natural raw materials (unfired earth/clay blocks, clay tiles, natural slate, wooden fibreboard)
- Local natural stone used in a restrained, contrasting manner
- Timber sourced from well-managed forests
- Lime-based mortar and breathable self-coloured renders
- Natural paints based on plant oils and minerals
- Sustainable materials like copper and zinc combined with glass and timber
- Earthy, neutral paint colors (whites, off-whites, light greys, and ochres) that complement the countryside
Roofs & form
- Consistently and simply pitched roofs
- Narrow rectangular plan forms that allow for subservient additions
- Flat dark tiles and natural slates laid in diminishing courses from the eaves
- Eaves dormers instead of mid-roof or over-complicated dormers
- Proportional chimneys appropriate to the style and scale of the house
- Avoidance of over-sailing roofs and boxed verges
Siting & landscape
- Siting buildings to integrate within the natural folds of the land and avoid excessive cut and fill
- Using split-level (stepped) designs for steeply sloping sites
- Varying the setback distance from the road compared to neighbours to prevent boring linear layouts
- Retaining existing roadside boundaries, mature trees, and native hedgerows
- Designing indirect, subtly curved driveways instead of harsh straight lines from the public road
- Restricting new boundaries to native hedgerows, sod-and-stone banks, or stone walls