Connecticut court: build without submitting plans and the “unreasonably withheld” defence never arises
Connecticut court: build without submitting plans and the “unreasonably withheld” defence never arises
2026-09-09 · Connecticut · Courts
Owners who built without submitting plans forfeited any argument that approval was unreasonably withheld, the Connecticut Appellate Court held in a decision released February 3, 2026 — because the parties had stipulated no approval was ever sought, the court never reached the reasonableness question at all.1
Casner v. Roberts, AC 47463, 237 Conn. App. 515, is not an association case. The approval right belonged to a subdivision developer under a restrictive covenant running with the land, not to an architectural review committee. The doctrine, however, is the one Connecticut associations enforce every week.
What happened
Lot owners built a six-car commercial garage and operated a roofing business from it. A covenant required prior plan approval. They did not seek it. The developer sued to enforce.
The panel — Suarez, Seeley and Eveleigh, Js. — affirmed in part and reversed in part.1
The holdings that carry across to associations
Build first and the reasonableness question disappears. The covenant's terms about a permissible residential garage were “clear and unambiguous,” and because the parties stipulated the garage was built without any plan approval, the court never had to decide whether approval would have been unreasonably withheld. The defence an owner would ordinarily raise was unavailable because the process was never triggered.
The COVID orders extended the clock. The three-year limitation in § 52-575a did not bar the action. It was suspended by Executive Order No. 7G roughly seven and a half months after the developer learned of the construction, and suit was brought less than eighteen months after Executive Order No. 10A lifted the suspension.
A late laches defence stays out. Refusing to allow laches to be pleaded late was within the trial court's discretion.
The reversal, and why it cuts the other way
The owners did not lose everything. The Appellate Court reversed the trial court's reading of the covenant as barring all commercial use of the property.
The covenant expressly permitted one commercial sign for an in-residence office. A document that contemplates a home office cannot simultaneously be read as a blanket prohibition on commercial activity — so the covenant “does not preclude all commercial uses of a property.”1
That is the more transferable half of the decision for Connecticut boards. Residential-character language in a declaration is routinely cited as authority to shut down any business activity in a unit. Casner is a reminder that the instrument is read as a whole, and a provision anticipating some commercial use limits how far the general language reaches.
Three practical consequences
Enforce the process, not just the outcome. The association's strongest position is procedural. An owner who never applied has no reasonableness argument to make. An owner who applied and was refused has one, and the association will be defending the substance of its decision.
Read your own document before asserting a total ban. Declarations that permit home offices, professional signage, or in-residence occupations have already conceded that not all commercial use is prohibited. Casner shows a court reversing precisely that overreach.
The pandemic tolling is a live trap running the other way. Section 52-575a gives three years to enforce a restriction on land use. The executive orders suspended that period, and Casner applies the suspension. An association sitting on an enforcement claim from 2020 or 2021 on the assumption it has expired should check the arithmetic — and so should an owner relying on the same assumption.
How it fits the rest of the Connecticut year
Connecticut introduced no bill on architectural review in either the 2025 or 2026 session. The rules in this area are being set by courts applying ordinary contract and property doctrine to individual declarations, which makes a published appellate decision on covenant construction unusually significant.
It also sits alongside a real constraint on approval discretion that arrived from the legislature by a different route: since January 1, 2026, an association reviewing a rooftop solar application on a qualifying single-family detached unit works to statutory deadlines, with the application deemed approved if the board misses them. Silence is consent there. Under an ordinary covenant, as Casner confirms, silence from the owner is forfeiture.
What to watch next
The reversal was on the scope of the commercial-use restriction, and it is the part most likely to be cited. Watch for it appearing in disputes over home businesses, short-term letting and in-unit professional practices — contexts where Connecticut declarations frequently carry both a residential-use clause and an explicit home-office carve-out.
The unresolved point is enforceability itself. The owners challenged whether the covenant was enforceable at all, but raised it for the first time on appeal, so the court did not review it. That question is still open for the next case.
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