The millionaire boss of fashion brand White Stuff wants to plant more than 1,000 trees to hide a tennis court, garage and skate park he built without permission at his South Hams home.

Sean Thomas has submitted a retrspective planning application for the additions to his luxury home near Salcombe.

The businessman built the court, skate bowl and two-storey double garage at his home at Gerston Point which overlooks the Kingsbridge estuary, without planning permission in 2016.

He is battling South Hams Council to save the development, which is in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, after the authority ordered him to tear it down and return the land to its previous condition.

His last planning application was turned down by the district council in September 2019 after a planning officer hailed the additions an “unwelcome and incongruous intrustion into an undeveloped countryside location.”

Mr Thomas’s latest plans include “substantial new planting over over 1,000 native trees” to “help screen” the development, as well as a bat roost, bird boxes and the planting of wild flowers along the estuary.

It also proposals a reed clearance and de-silting of a wetland area near his property and the millionaire has offered to repaint the roof of the garage a darker grey so it “assimilates far more successfully into the wider landscape.”

An objection to the proposals has been received by the council from Bob Christian of Punchards Down, Totnes, who said: “This is a protected site as far as I was aware, and the owner was told to stop building and return the land back to its origins.

“I guess when you have money the rules don’t apply.”

Peirs Rogers of Higher Warren Road, Kingsbridge also objected, saying: “It would never have been granted if applied for before the work was completed.”

The application will be considered by the council’s planning committee.

The South Hams Society has urged people to write to the council about the planning applicaation.

On its Facebook site, the conservation charity wrote: “Now, we at the SHS aren’t against people doing what they want with their homes: but we are here to protect the AONB for everyone to enjoy.

“The South Hams Society works hard on behalf of the community to keep the South Hams special, to monitor inappropriate development and to insist that SHDC enforces their own stated planning policy when necessary. Otherwise whats the point of having it at all?”