Vehicular Access and Garaging

The position of vehicular and pedestrian access to a house will depend on the site frontage and be subject to advice provided by the County Highway Engineer. Within the site itself the layout of drive and hard-standing will depend on the relationship between garage and house.

There will generally be a preference for attaching a garage to the dwelling as a subsidiary volume to it rather than it being a free-standing structure. This will allow direct connection under cover and will presume upon an extension of the same materials and form of construction as the house.

Even a single garage door will be larger than any other opening in the house and it is preferable to divide double garage doors into two.

The extension might take the form of a simple lean-to at the gable end or extending as a ridge and gable at a lower level.

Where permission is granted for a free-standing garage the National Park Authority will require the construction to be in keeping with the surrounding buildings and will normally resist the use of "off the peg" kit structures or flat roofed boxes.

The impact of the larger garage doors, particularly the two-car up and over type, can sometimes be very much out of scale with other openings in the building. If possible it is better to have two separate doors with a pier or column between them.

There is a wide selection of garage doors of different construction and types of operation. In the National Park reticence in character and colouring will be favoured: the door leaf should have the appearance of vertical timber boarding, and indeed preferably be genuinely so. The pressed steel panel types are clearly false and inappropriately pretentious.