Yes, and the neighbours are already at it. Forty-eight buildings in and around the village carry a listing, one of them Grade I. Two conservation areas cover parts of the settlement. Everything else is ordinary housing with ordinary planning rules attached. Braunton does not stop people altering their homes. It just charges a handful of addresses a heritage tax in paperwork while the rest get on with it.
The listed stock breaks down as one Grade I building, 3 at Grade II star and 44 at Grade II. Listing applies to the whole building rather than the pretty side facing the road, and it covers the inside as well as the outside, which is the part that surprises buyers who assumed the protection stopped at the front door. Replacing windows, opening up a chimney, moving a staircase or bolting anything onto the roof becomes an application rather than a weekend. Owning one is a commitment to a particular kind of relationship with a conservation officer, and the people who enjoy it tend to be the people who wanted that relationship in the first place.
Two conservation areas apply here, Braunton and Heanton Punchardon. Designation does not freeze a house, but it adds controls: demolition needs consent, works to trees need notice, and councils have the power to strip out permitted development rights inside the boundary. The practical effect is that the standard extension you could build without asking anywhere else becomes a conversation about whether it suits the street. Anyone buying inside either area should find out precisely what has been removed before drawing anything.
The volume tells you people do this constantly. North Devon's planning register logged 342 applications for Braunton between April 2024 and June 2026, with 154 of those in the last twelve months. That is a village where extensions, garden rooms, garage conversions and loft work are routine business rather than a rare event, and where any given street has probably had somebody's plans pinned to a lamp post recently.
For most houses here the usual rules apply. A rear extension within the permitted development limits, a loft conversion that stays inside the roof, solar panels on an unremarkable roof: none of those need an application unless the address is listed or sits inside a conservation area. The two things worth checking before making an offer are whether the property carries a listing and whether it falls within either boundary, because those two facts change the answer completely and neither is obvious from the photographs.
Braunton sits in the middle of the range on this. Not a village smothered in heritage designations, not a free-for-all either, and the difference between the two comes down to which side of a boundary line your prospective house happens to sit on.