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A plan to replace a former spa at a Herefordshire beauty spot with eight large sustainable homes has been granted permission.

Manchester-based Dwell Ahead has applied to redevelop the site off Leys Hill Road in the Wye Valley national landscape at Kerne Bridge, in the south of the county.

The one-and-a-half-hectare sloping site has been vacant since the closure about four years ago of the women-only Wye Valley Spa, before which it was home to Cats children’s nursery.

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All the existing structures would be demolished under the plan, which replaced an earlier approved proposal to build five larger “executive” homes on the site.

In a modern style, the five four-bedroom and three three-bedroom detached houses would be partly recessed into the hillside, their pitched roofs would have solar panels, while inside the houses would incorporate several energy and water saving measures.

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The Wye Valley national landscape’s planning officer Josh Bailey commented that “built form hereabouts is small scale with little if any modern infrastructure”, and felt the “bunker-style appearance” of the proposed designs was “clearly unprepossessing” and “not a positive response to this protected landscape”.

The proposal for “large, luxury dwellings” was also “far from providing genuinely suitable affordable housing”, a recurring problem in protected landscapes, he added.

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In response to this and other criticisms from Herefordshire Council’s landscape officer and Walford Parish Council, the houses’ design and layout were made less obtrusive.

This appeared to satisfy council planning officer Simon Withers, who concluded the scheme “will satisfactorily preserve the landscape character of the site and wider locality, particularly when compared to the extant [five-home] permission”.

Praising the proposal’s “high standard of sustainable design”, he said that compared to the previous, “locally unpopular” use of the site, any additional traffic from the houses “would not warrant the refusal of planning permission”.