THERE are touches that suggest it is no ordinary farmhouse bed-and-breakfast. The Prince of Wales and his wife are to take paying guests at a new base in Wales where the sewage is recycled through a reedbed, the dining room seats 24 and the furniture is made of wood from the landlord’s own forests.

The prince has submitted plans to transform a ramshackle collection of farm buildings on the edge of the Black Mountain near Llandovery, Carmarthenshire, into a rural retreat.

It will provide his first home in the principality since his investiture at Caernarfon Castle in 1969. In a pioneering move, it will also become the first royal home to serve as a mini-hotel.

Detailed designs for the recently-acquired Llwynywormwood estate have been drawn up by Craig Hamilton, a traditionalist architect favoured by the prince. Hamilton is also rebuilding Harewood Park in Herefordshire as a possible country house for Prince William.

The Welsh property will include a three-bedroom accommodation wing for Charles and Camilla. A separate section of the complex will be what could be described as “C&C’s B&B”: it will consist of three guest bedrooms and a sitting room. Staff will live in another part of the 18th and 19th century farmstead, which has four bedrooms.

The guests, who will only be able to stay when the prince and the Duchess of Cornwall are not in residence, will be offered organic breakfasts with fruit and vegetables grown in the kitchen garden.

According to the plans lodged with Carmarthenshire county council, the whole property will have a traditional “back to nature” theme. Walls and ceilings will be plastered with lime. Fittings and furniture will be carved from oak, douglas fir and larch from Charles’s estates and the heat from the farmstead’s woodchip burner will be conserved by hemp and sheep’s wool insulation.

Underground tanks will capture rainwater and a reed bed system will treat sewage. There are also plans to fill a lake from an existing stream that could provide small amounts of hydro-electric power.

Trees will be replanted in the grounds using maps dating from 1909 and buildings from the 20th century will be pulled down because, according to the plans, they “spoil the historic nature of the farmstead”. Concrete in the courtyards will be replaced with crunchy gravel and cobbles and a new barn is to be built using oak and thatch.

The architect’s plans for Llwynywormwood sum up the prince’s vision of his Welsh retreat as a return to old ways of living, an approach he has pioneered at Poundbury, his traditional-style village in Dorset.

In one image in the plans a young man, apparently a nobleman, sits sketching beneath a tree with a hound at his feet. In another a farm worker holding a staff and wearing traditional Welsh dress gazes admiringly at the prince’s new dining hall from the field outside.

Charles bought the 192-acre property through his Duchy of Cornwall earlier this year for an estimated £1.2m. It adds to his other country properties, which include Highgrove in Gloucester-shire and Birkhall on the Balmoral estate.

The social hub of the house will be a dining room to seat 24 featuring a large window described in Hamilton’s scheme as being “of an ecclesiastical nature”. Its mullions will be made of dressed local sandstone.

“The property is intended to serve as a venue for the various foundations associated with the Prince of Wales, such as the Prince’s Trust and the Prince’s Foundation,” the planning application states.

Charles will respond to criticism that he has been too slow to buy a home in Wales by hosting receptions and conferences for the Welsh branches of his charities. There is space for five kitchens and two further barns can be used for the largest functions. Parking for 38 cars is envisaged.

Until now Charles has chosen to lodge with friends when in Wales. He has stayed regularly at Powis Castle, home of the Earl of Powis, and with the Legge-Bourkes at the Glanusk estate near Crickhowell, Powys. Tiggy Legge-Bourke, a member of the family, was nanny to princes William and Harry.

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