Should this home be demolished?

[Xithras]

14. Pretty house, but knock it down anyway.

The UK has some of the best written rural preservation laws in the world, and for good reason. As an island with limited land for development, Britain, Wales, and Scotland have drawn hard lines between "developed" areas where homes can be built, and "rural" areas where development is nearly frozen. In designated rural areas, homes can ONLY be built if they're replacing another structure, or if many hoops are jumped through to demonstrate why a waiver is justified. These laws were created specifically to prevent the kind of sprawl that has overtaken countries like the US, and to prevent the wealthy from turning the countryside into a sea of private estates.

While the home may be pretty and eco-friendly, it doesn't change the fact that it's contributing to sprawl by building in a preserved area where development is prohibited, and increasing the human population (with it's pollution and traffic) in an area where there is an active effort to keep population numbers to a minimum, and only minimal municipal infrastructure to support them.

Sprawl doesn't stop being sprawl simply because we like the design of a particular house. It may be an unpopular opinion, but it's the environmentally correct one.