Landmark hotel in Saunton Sands seeks more letting rooms

Permission is being sought for more rooms to let at a luxury art deco hotel and famous landmark on the North Devon coast.

P R Brend (Hoteliers) Ltd is proposing to create two ‘high-end’ four-bedroom apartments in a new three-storey ‘beach house’ and two and three bedrooms in the new ‘garden apartments’ at the Saunton Sands Hotel.

Both structures will be separate to the main hotel.

It wants to demolish four service buildings and replace them with one to the south west of the hotel which the company says will enhance the setting of the main hotel and wider national protected landscape at Braunton.

Saunton claims to have some of the country’s best surf and is part of the North Devon World Surfing Reserve.

Both the garden apartments and the service building will be one storey.

White rendered dominant horizontal walls in front and to the side of the Lorna Doone apartments which the applicants say detracts from the hotel will be removed and a hedge planted to screen the car park.

Agents for the applicant Woodward Smith Architects said Saunton Sands Hotel is instantly recognisable at the head of Saunton Sands Beach.

“The proposals seek to preserve the dominance of the hotel in this view and repeat the distinctive pattern of development to each side that allows the landscape of Saunton Down behind to flow through between the buildings and connect with the dunes and beach to the south.”

They said the design for the beach house is an improvement on a proposal made in 2019.

Consent has been granted  by North Devon Council since then to add new accommodation to the site.