The couple took lots of walks – making notes of big gardens and writing more than 100 letters to homeowners whose gardens or side plots looked promising.<\/p>\n
“Our families thought it was strange,” Sogand Howard laughed. <\/p>\n
“They saw us writing to people they considered completely random. But that’s very often how the land market works in this country.”<\/p>\n
The pair, who have a four-year-old son, had explored buying an existing house, but prices were high, and most of the properties they viewed would have required significant renovation.<\/p>\n
“As architects, we knew that if we bought an older house, we’d then end up spending extra to bring it to the standard we wanted,” Sogand Howard said. <\/p>\n
“Building gave us another route.”<\/p>\n
Through their search, the Howards discovered that many opportunities exist but accessing them can be complicated. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The couple took lots of walks – making notes of big gardens and writing more than 100 letters…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":462318,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[6225,6485,6486,1120,96,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-462317","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/462317","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=462317"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/462317\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/462318"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=462317"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=462317"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=462317"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}