Yes, and your neighbours got there first. Nine listed buildings in the entire village. No conservation area. No scheduled monuments inside the boundary. The thing standing between you and a bigger kitchen is not the house, it is the view it sits in.
The listed stock is small and specific: nine buildings, none of them grade one, three at grade two star and six at grade two. Listing covers the whole building rather than the pretty side, so consent is needed for anything affecting its character inside as well as out, and it can extend to structures within the grounds. The older fabric clusters where the village started, in Knighton and West Wembury, because the twentieth century is when farmland went for housing and everything built then came without a listing attached. About 11% of dwellings on the council-tax valuation list predate 1930. The other 89% are not a heritage problem, they are a building-regulations one.
People here alter their homes constantly. Planning applications across the area came to 497 between April 2024 and June 2026, with 215 of those in the last twelve months. That is a live, busy, unremarkable stream of household applications in a village of this size, which tells you more than any policy document: the process is routine, the appetite is real, and nobody is treating an extension as a doomed venture.
The practical position splits cleanly. If the house is one of the nine, engage a conservationaccredited architect early and budget for a longer route. If it is not, which covers almost everything, the question becomes whether the work falls inside permitted development or needs a full application. That is where the landscape designation bites: the whole of Wembury sits inside the South Devon Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, and permitted development rights are narrower in protected landscapes than they are in an ordinary suburb. Cladding, larger rear extensions, side extensions and sizeable outbuildings are the usual casualties. Confirm the current position with South Hams before ordering anything, because the answer turns on the specific address and the specific proposal rather than on the general rule.
The stock helps. Roughly 54% of dwellings here are bungalows and about 28% are detached, which means most homes sit on their own plot with room on at least one side and no party wall to negotiate. That is a materially easier starting point than a terrace, where every extension is a conversation with two neighbours and a shared drain.
Freedom to alter a home is one of Wembury's stronger cards. The heritage burden is thin, the plots are generous, and the only serious gatekeeper is a landscape designation that cares less about what you build than about what it looks like from the coast path.