The artist going by the name Mr. Doodle, best known for covering his Tenterden mansion in his Keith Haring-like drawings, is facing objections from officials over his plans for a new seaside home in Dungeness, a hamlet in the town of Lydd on the southern coast of Kent.

The home was designed by architect Guy Hollaway for Sam Cox with renderings showing a rusted metal exterior with the 28-year-old artist’s doodles laser-cut into the surface. As first reported by Kent Online, the Lydd Town Council objected to the metal façade.

The town council said the façade would “not be in keeping with the historical value of Dungeness” and could “impact the environmental value of the area,” the local news outlet reported. Officials fear the façade could endanger wildlife that might get caught in the metal and suggested the home could become a tourist destination, impacting area traffic.

Artnet News has reached out to the town clerk and Hollaway for comment but did not hear back by press time. A representative for Cox deferred comment to Hollaway.

Hollaway, in remarks to Kent Online, defended the appearance of the three-bedroom home as “visually subtle” and meant to “merge into the landscape” while pointing to other rusting metal structures like abandoned railroads in the area.

British artist Sam Cox, aka Mr Doodle, reveals the Doodle House, a 12-room mansion at Tenterden, in Kent, which has been covered, inside and out in the artist’s trademark monochrome, cartoonish hand-drawn doodles. Photo: Gareth Fuller/PA Images via Getty Images.

“We’re proposing to clad the building in corten steel, which is rusting metal, which will merge into the landscape,” Hollaway said.

He said the doodle apertures are “quite small” and similar in scale to the façade of Pobble House, another building in Dungeness designed by Hollaway’s firm around 10 years ago.

“There have not been any problems with wildlife being trapped within the facade. We would, therefore, envisage this facade would perform in the same way and this wouldn’t be an issue,” Hollaway said.

The architect noted that Cox’s home would replace an existing bungalow on the site and will be built on the same footprint, with crews dismantling and restoring historic railway carriages before returning them to the same location on the property.

The fate of the home, as reported by Kent Online, will be decided later this month by the Folkestone and Hythe District Council, the local government authority.

British artist Sam Cox, aka Mr Doodle, with his wife Alena, in the Doodle House in Tenterden, Kent. Photo: Gareth Fuller / PA Images via Getty Images.

Cox skyrocketed to viral fame on the back of his “graffiti spaghetti,” an obsessive style that has attracted nearly 7 million followers between Instagram and TikTok, and fetched eye-watering sums at auction.

After buying his Tenterden mansion for £1.35 million ($1.54 million) in 2020, he decorated the entirety of it in his black-and-white squiggles—an undertaking he shared on Twitter (now X). The process took Cox two years to complete, using up some 900 liters of white paint, 401 cans of black spray paint for the exterior, 286 bottles of black paint for the inside walls, and 2,296 pen nibs.

His career, and his rise from humble beginnings to artistic fame despite mental illness, has since been subject to documentary treatment with The Trouble with Mr. Doodle.