Sarah Beeny is stuck in row with neighbours over landscaping project at her £3million Somerset home
Property Ladder star Sarah Beeny is stuck in row with neighbors over landscaping project at her £3million Somerset home while also battling cancer
- Sarah Beeny has inadvertently caused uproar with her latest landscaping project
- It comes as her family continue to build their 8,000 sq ft home in Somerset
- The family snapped up the 220-acre farm it sits on for £3million in 2018
- Part of their vision included a lake – to be created at the back of the house
She’s been contending with a grueling round of chemotherapy as she battles breast cancer.
But, as if that were not enough, vivacious Property Ladder star Sarah Beeny has inadvertently caused uproar with her latest landscaping project – provoking objections from two parish councils and being damned by a neighbor as ‘intolerable’.
It wasn’t what Beeny, 51, and her husband, artist Graham Swift, had in mind when they began building their 8,000 sq ft, three-storey, seven-bedroom ‘mini Downton Abbey’ at the 220-acre Somerset farm they snapped up for £3million in 2018.
Part of their vision included a lake – to be created at the back of the house by scooping huge amounts of earth out of a field.
Sarah Beeny (pictured) is embroiled in a row with her neighbors over a landscaping project at her Somerset home
The Beeney family, who featured in Sarah Beeny’s New Life in the Country series around the construction of the house
There have been no objections to the lake—but barely contained outrage at how the spoil was disposed of.
Beeny and Swift used it to build up embankment on the edge of a field, thereby heightening their privacy and, simultaneously, diminishing the noise of passing traffic – at least, the noise they experience.
Unfortunately, this artful bit of landscaping – for which the couple failed to secure planning permission – has been derided by one local parish council.
Objecting to Beeny and Swift’s bid for retrospective permission, it argues that they have ‘changed the landscape for the worse’ and adds, witheringly: ‘It would appear no engineering design or thought has gone into the creation of these banks.’
It wasn’t what Beeny, 51, and her husband, artist Graham Swift, had in mind when they began building their 8,000 sq ft, three-storey, seven-bedroom ‘mini Downton Abbey’
Another parish council says the landscaping has come at a high sonic price for those on the other side of the road.
‘The height and shape of the earth bank…is having the effect of reflecting traffic noise back towards [them]’adversely affecting the residents’ living conditions.’
So it seems. Alleging that the embankments appear to ‘have been constructed for purely selfish reasons’, two residents say that the noise in their garden is now ‘intolerable’.
Another local claim that Beeny and Swift ‘dumped the spoils on good agricultural land and [are] trying to find a way out of a problem they have created… this should have had planning or [they should have] paid for the removal of spoils’.
Beeny, understandably conserving her energy, declines to comment.
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