Dive Brief:

• A couple in Glandwr in Wales is trying to find a way to keep a low-environmental-impact house for which they never got a building permit and that the Pembrokeshire Council, the local governmental unit, has voted must come down.
• Their "Hobbit House" was erected with round beams, walls using limed straw and a green, vegetated roof on land that the woman's parents own.
• The couple acknowledges that not getting a permit "wasn't the best start," but they are appealing the council's decision to the Welsh national assembly.

Dive Insight:

The council said a Welsh government inspector took a look and said "the benefits of the development did not outweigh the harm to the character and appearance of the countryside." It sounds like the flip side of a Raleigh, North Carolina, dispute in which an architect who is building a Modernist house in a historic neighborhood is fighting to keep a city commission from yanking his building permit after a neighbor complained that his home didn't fit in.