In 2009, Harry Potter star Rupert Grint bought the £5.4 million Kimpton Grange estate; 17 years later, he won approval for a 15-home eco-village described as carbon neutral

Ron Weasley might have never sat through a local council planning meeting, but Rupert Grint has spent roughly seven years doing exactly that. The actor who played Harry Potter's loyal best friend bought a sprawling estate in Hertfordshire back in 2009, and this year he has finally won permission to turn it into a far cry from Hogwarts: a 15-home carbon-neutral eco-village. Homes across the UK were responsible for around a fifth of the country's greenhouse gas emissions in 2022, according to a research briefing from the House of Commons Library. The Climate Change Committee, the government's independent climate advisory body, has said the UK will not meet its emissions targets without a near-complete overhaul of the housing stock. That larger picture is where Grint's new project comes into play.

A vicarage nobody wanted to buy

Back in 2009, Grint bought Kimpton Grange, a former vicarage set on 22 acres between the villages of Harpenden and Codicote. He bought it for £5.4 million. The Grade II-listed manor house itself is around 13,000 square feet and comes with six bedroom suites, an indoor leisure wing comprising a swimming pool, a gym and a cinema room, as well as a walled garden, a floodlit tennis court and a large barn on the wider grounds. Sounds like your dream house. Grint tried to sell the estate in 2018 for around £6 million but could not find a buyer. Instead of leaving the large property largely unused, he and his family began considering a different plan: turning the land into a small neighborhood of homes rather than one private residence.


From objections to approval

In 2022, plans for a 15-home eco-village were formally submitted to North Hertfordshire District Council, which involved converting the main house into six apartments and adding another nine houses to the whole estate. However, not everybody was enthusiastic about the project. Some Kimpton residents said the project could disrupt local wildlife, including frogs that migrate through the area each year and red kites nesting in nearby trees, and argued that lost woodland could not be replaced for many years. The North Hertfordshire District Council planning committee voted to approve the scheme in November 2024, but that vote alone didn't grant final permission. The legal agreement covering Grint's financial contributions to local services took time to finalize, and full, binding planning consent was ultimately issued on June 12, 2026, 17 years after his original 2009 purchase.

What the eco-village will actually include

In accordance with the agreement, Grint is required to contribute around £200,000 to the local community. This includes contributions worth £100,000 to Kimpton Parish Council, £70,000 towards the extension of Katherine Warington School, and £11,400 for school places for special needs children. The architecture firm behind the scheme, Clear Architects, has described the plans as "truly outstanding and innovative" and said the finished development will be carbon neutral. Under the agreement, Grint will also donate a piece of land to the parish council, which will be used to create a park within the village, complete with a circular walking track and picnic areas for the whole village to use.

Why carbon-neutral homes are a big deal right now

Projects like this are not just about one celebrity's backyard. A 2019 life cycle assessment titled ‘The impact of community sustainability: A life cycle assessment of three ecovillages’ published in the Journal of Cleaner Production, which compared the environmental footprint of residents of three American ecovillages with the average US resident, found that ecovillage living has a significantly reduced environmental footprint in the areas of home energy use, transportation, food and waste. The study notes that design decisions at the community scale, not only individual behaviors, can have a substantial impact on a household’s climate footprint. The plan at Kimpton Grange is much the same: shared green space, energy-conscious buildings and smaller individual footprints, built into the design from the start rather than added later.

Millennials are paying close attention to homes like this

This kind of project also draws on an emerging trend that researchers have been observing among younger generations. Deloitte's 2024 Gen Z and Millennial Survey found that 63 percent of millennials said they're willing to pay more for environmentally sustainable goods and services, and 48 percent said they and their colleagues have pressured employers to act on climate change, even as cost of living remained their top overall concern in the same survey.

A famous face, a familiar debate

Grint’s Hertfordshire estate is likely to attract attention simply because of its ownership. But the more interesting story here isn't really about a Harry Potter star's property portfolio. It is about how landowners, architects and local councils across the UK are being forced to think differently about new housing at a time when climate targets are becoming harder to ignore. Whether or not Kimpton Grange is a truly carbon-neutral community or just a well-marketed one will perhaps only become clear once people actually move in. For now, it’s just one small, well-photographed instance of a much larger change that is already underway.