Our Six Children Helped Me Create This Grand Palace in the Countryside ; Andrew Curry Used New Rules From John Prescott to Build His Stunning

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Wild Wood is an ultramodern country house clinging to the slopes of the Chiltern Hills on the edge of the Oxfordshire village of Chinnor. It is a perfect example of the avant-garde architecture the Government wants to see in the countryside, but it should have never been given planning permission.

'Planning officials at South Oxfordshire District Council were very impressed with our design, but said it didn't just drive a coach and horses through their planning policies, it drove ten double-decker buses through them,' says property developer Andrew Curry. He dramatically won the right to build the new house for his family on the site of a single-storey Twenties brick-and-flint cottage in 2003.

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Our Six Children Helped Me Create This Grand Palace in the Countryside ; Andrew Curry Used New Rules From John Prescott to Build His Stunning

The result is a stunning five-storey house, ten times the size of the original, which went on the market in June for 3.75 million and has had an offer above this sum.

To get permission, Andrew, 45, exploited so-called PPG7, a planning rule introduced by John Prescott in 1997 to encourage futuristic design in the countryside.

Prescott's idea was widely ridiculed becau...

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