Nearly five years ago, St Peter resident Frederick Brown submitted an application for Petit Clos Luce in Route de la Marette, above Les Mielles golf course.
Undeterred by refusals, he persisted and last year the Environment and Public Services Committee relented and invited him to lodge an application.
It was approved this week.
For Mr Brown and his daughter, Olivia English, it is a happy ending to the long and eventful tale of a little house once surrounded by open farmland and now home only to a colony of honey bees.
‘It has a lot of history for me,’ he said, ‘from my time down in the bay surfing or listening to the little portable gramophone player I used to take with me, with a couple of records by Leslie Hutchinson or somebody like that,’ he recalled.
Award-winning architect Richard Le Sueur has represented Mr Brown with equally dogged determination.
His plans envisage a simple two-room, two-storey cottage with a small extension to the rear with a kitchen below and a bathroom above, inside the existing area of the structure.
A small cottage garden will be created in front, with natural vegetation allowed to flourish to the west.
The small area of meadowland to the south, up to the old German railway embankment, will be also be restored.
