Should I Stay or Should I Go?

Should I Stay or Should I Go?

The Newcastle Courtyard house, a prefabricated replacement house, recently won an RIBA North East Award. The client, the contractor and we were delighted. The story is more than the award, this is about the bold decision by the client to commission a bespoke design, for suit them in the area they wanted to live, they had grown-up children and wanted to 'rightsize', in a comfortable, sustainable home. What are the factors leading to that decision?

Hannah Fry has been talking recently about stamp duty — specifically, about the way it seizes up the housing market by taxing the wrong end of the transaction. It's the classic economist's complaint: SDLT punishes the decision to move, so people who should move don't. Older households sit tight in family houses long after the family has left, because moving costs them a five- or six-figure cheque to HMRC for the privilege of living somewhere smaller.

It's a fair complaint. But if you've spent any time in this sector, you'll know the tax bill is rarely the real reason someone stays put. It's the excuse. The real reason is that nobody has offered them anywhere worth moving to.

The Clash had it half right

"Should I stay or should I go" implies a binary. For most owners of oversized, ageing homes, it isn't. The choice on offer is: stay in a house you know, with all its faults, or go to a smaller version of the same compromise — a flat with worse light, a bungalow with no character, a retirement development with a name like "The Beeches." Given that menu, staying wins every time, stamp duty or not.

The option nobody's selling them is the one that would actually work: a purpose-designed home, built or refurbished specifically for how they live now — not a scaled-down version of how they lived thirty years ago.

Downsizing is the wrong word

Downsizing sounds like loss — smaller rooms, fewer things, a diminished life. Right-sizing is the more honest description of what's actually on offer, and it's a much easier sell. A well-designed smaller home isn't a lesser version of the big house; it's a better-performing one.

The numbers back this up. A fabric-first, high-performance home — PassivHaus or EnerPHit standard — uses 80–90% less energy than the draughty five-bed it's replacing. That's not a marginal saving; for anyone on a pension worried about heating bills, it's transformative. But the energy saving is almost the least interesting part. What people actually notice day to day is the comfort: no draughts, no cold spots, stable temperatures room to room, none of the damp and condensation that plagues older housing stock, and — often overlooked — genuinely better acoustic separation from the outside world. These are not "eco" features. They're just what a well-built house feels like, and most of the UK's housing stock has never offered it.

Add a floor plan designed around who you live, perhaps a courtyard for better daylight, and none of the unused bedrooms and box rooms that make big houses expensive to run and depressing to maintain, and "smaller" starts to look like an upgrade rather than a retreat.

New build or refurbish?

For clients weighing this up, the practical route depends heavily on what's available.

New build is the harder path to consent. In towns and cities, plots are rare — a knockdown-and-replace is possible, but most local authorities now start from a presumption in favour of retention and refurbishment over demolition, so it needs a clear case for why the existing building can't be adapted. Often on grey-belt, green-belt, rural, or greenfield land, new houses are generally resisted outright. There is a route — NPPF paragraph 84(e), the so-called "exceptional design" clause — for a single isolated new dwelling in the countryside, but the bar is genuinely high (truly outstanding architecture, not just "nice"), and the success rate is low.

Which raises the obvious question about Newcastle Courtyard: if new build is this hard to get past a planning committee, how did a replacement house end up not just consented but winning a regional RIBA award? That's not a rhetorical flourish — it's a genuinely different conversation to the refurbishment route below, and one worth having before you assume either is off the table.

Refurbishment is usually the more available option, but it isn't a light-touch job if the target is PassivHaus-level performance. A dilapidated existing house on a plot is often the most realistic starting point of all: partly retained and transformed through extension, which uses the existing planning fall-back rather than needing fresh consent for a new dwelling. But to get a listed or older building to EnerPHit standard typically means back-to-brick, insulation and re-plaster throughout, triple-glazed windows, and a genuinely airtight envelope — which in practice means treating it as close to a full rebuild behind the façade. Listed buildings add a further layer of constraint: England has around 400,000 listed buildings out of 23.4 million homes, and the more historically significant the fabric, the harder (and more expensive) the upgrade. Although we also have examples of Listed buildings including a Grade II, 1780’s Bloomsbury townhouse, to DEC A and a 60-80% energy use reduction over an average UK house.

Location still matters more than either

None of this works if the location, and site is wrong. Solar access and orientation, the massing and form of the building relative to its plot, the size of the site, and proximity to services and connectivity all shape whether "right-sizing" actually delivers a better life — being close enough to walk to things matters as much to a downsizing couple as thermal performance does.

One thing worth saying plainly to those who assume sustainable design is still a bargaining chip with planners: it isn't, particularly. A few years ago, a strong sustainability case could sometimes buy additional design flexibility from an authority weighing up a scheme. That's no longer really true — most authorities now simply expect this as baseline, not as a trade.

The pitch

Stamp duty reform, if it ever happens, will remove a real obstacle. But it won't, on its own, get a single boomer out of a house that's too big for them. What will is showing them a version of "smaller" that's warmer, quieter, cheaper to run, and better designed than the house they're in — built either from the ground up or found inside the shell of something that already exists.

That's a conversation for an architect, not a tax lawyer.

Whether you are a downsizer, rightsizer, empty-nester, wanting to release equity, have lower household running costs or simply want to discuss if the grass is greener and the real benefits of a purpose-designed home, please get in touch.