What draws me to Amersham is the way buildings here conceal their own history. Walk along the High Street in the Old Town and you see what appears to be a row of elegant Georgian facades — neat brick fronts, sash windows, symmetrical proportions. But behind many of those eighteenth-century faces lie medieval timber frames, oak posts and wattle-and-daub panels that predate the brick by three hundred years. When Georgian taste demanded a modern appearance, owners dressed the older structures in new brickwork rather than pulling them down. The Tudor historian John Leland described Amersham around 1540 as "a right pretty market town of one street well built with timber," and much of that timber is still there, hidden in plain sight beneath the brick. For an architect, a place like this is a reminder that the best buildings are rarely finished — they accumulate, adapt and carry their whole history within their walls.
Award-winning Architects in Amersham
Conservation-Led Architecture Across the Country
I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006, and we now work with clients across the country from our studio in Oxford. A town like Amersham, with more than 150 listed buildings and a conservation area covering much of the Old Town, calls for an architect who understands how historic buildings work — not just as planning considerations, but as physical structures with their own logic. I am an ARB registered, RIBA Chartered architect and a member of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, which has shaped how I think about older properties: repair rather than replace, understand the materials before you intervene, respect what the building already knows. My wife Phoebe is a conservation architect, and that shared commitment to heritage runs through everything we do. Our Passivhaus home The Deerings won the RIBA East Award in 2018, and I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the Building Design Awards that same year. Our work has been published in Dezeen, The Modern House Journal and Grand Designs Magazine, and in 2025 I was invited to judge the British Homes Awards.
Architectural Services for a Town Built in Layers
Renovations in Amersham are rarely straightforward, and that is exactly what makes them rewarding. The conservation area covering the historic core along High Street, Pound Street and Aylesbury Road sets the context — every application within it carries weight, and rightly so. A property in the Old Town may present a Georgian brick front while concealing a timber-framed structure several centuries older — oak posts, brick nogging, perhaps a surviving inglenook and bread oven behind later partitions. Understanding how these buildings were assembled, what holds them together and how they have been altered over the centuries is essential before any intervention begins. As a member of SPAB, I approach every renovation with the conviction that the building has something to teach you before you pick up a pencil. The Grade I listed St Mary's Church, with its origins around 1140, its thirteenth-century restorations and the Drake family chapel added in the seventeenth century, shows how the best buildings in Amersham have always grown through careful, considered addition rather than wholesale change.
In a town where Georgian brick conceals medieval timber frames and flint walls have stood for centuries, retrofit energy standards must work with what is already there. EnerPHit is the Passivhaus Institute's framework for retrofit, and it is particularly suited to the solid-walled properties found across Amersham — the flint, the brick, the timber-framed structures that have always given back warmth slowly. Where a building has survived three hundred years, you do not change its nature; you make it work harder. Careful external insulation, airtightness at critical joints, and mechanical ventilation with heat recovery are the tools. The result is a home that breathes as it always has, but retains the heat that once escaped — warmer, quieter, fundamentally more comfortable while the building's character remains itself.
Extension Design in Amersham requires an architect who can read the context. Amersham-on-the-Hill, developed largely after the Metropolitan Railway arrived in 1892, carries a distinctive character — Arts and Crafts houses designed by John Harold Kennard, the 1920 Elm Close development built as part of the Homes for Heroes programme, and 1930s parades that give the streets a Metroland quality. Extending a house from this era means working with generous plots and mature gardens, creating space that connects the home more openly to its surroundings. In the Old Town, the challenge is different: the plots are tighter, the conservation area constrains options, and the materials palette — flint, handmade brick, timber — must be understood before a single line is drawn. The best extensions in places like this do not compete with what already exists but continue the conversation.
Sustainable Design in Amersham means working with a landscape that has accumulated layers of human care for centuries. The flint walls, the timber frames, the brick of the Market Hall given to the town in 1682 — all speak to building that endures. When we design sustainably here, we are not introducing an abstract principle but continuing that tradition: homes that use energy and materials as efficiently as possible, that fit naturally into their surroundings, and that will be worth maintaining by future generations. In a place where the best buildings layer their histories rather than start fresh, that is not a constraint but an invitation.
PassivHaus Design offers a different proposition entirely. A new home in Amersham designed to Passivhaus standards would need barely any conventional heating — passive solar gain, internal heat sources and a highly insulated, airtight envelope do the work. Where Old Amersham's builders relied on massive flint and timber walls to hold warmth, a Passivhaus achieves the same end through precision: warm in winter, cool in summer, quiet and consistent throughout.
New Build Design here means responding to a place where centuries of building have established a strong sense of what belongs. Amersham sits within the Chilterns National Landscape, and that designation carries the weight of a National Park in planning terms — every new home must earn its place through quality of design and a materials palette that connects it to the chalk hills and beechwoods that surround it. For sites in the open countryside beyond the town, Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework provides a route for truly exceptional homes — architecture that responds to the long views and the pastoral setting with the same care the builders of the Old Town brought to their timber frames and flint walls.
Amersham is built on the principle that the best buildings are never truly finished. The Georgian brick hiding medieval timber, the Market Hall still standing after more than three centuries, the Arts and Crafts homes on the Hill alongside the later housing beyond — all of this shows a place where generations have chosen to build on what came before rather than start again. Whether you are working with a listed property, bringing warmth and efficiency to an older home, extending what you already have, or creating something entirely new, we approach the work with the same belief: your building has something to teach us before we propose anything at all.