Inside the Church of St Peter ad Vincula in Broad Hinton stands a monument that has stayed with me since I first encountered it. Colonel Francis Glanville, killed fighting for the King at Bridgwater in 1645, is rendered in standing alabaster — armoured, holding the staff of his standard — with a sword, gauntlets, helmet and escutcheon displayed on the wall above. It is an extraordinary marriage of craft and memory, sculpture and relic, each making the other more powerful. That instinct to preserve something real alongside something made runs through the whole village. The buildings here draw from the chalk, sarsen and brick of the North Wessex Downs, roofed in thatch and tile, and the church itself was rebuilt between 1634 and 1636 after decades of decay so severe that parishioners had refused communion for fear of falling masonry. Broad Hinton is a village that has always valued the act of rebuilding — not erasing the past, but finding the resolve to make it habitable again.
Award-winning Architects in Broad Hinton
An Architect's Practice Built on Craft and Care
Gresford Architects is a RIBA Chartered and ARB Registered practice, founded in London in 2006 and now working from Oxford with clients across the country. I studied at the Mackintosh School of Architecture in Glasgow — a place that instilled a keen sense of craftsmanship and an enthusiasm for exploring surfaces, joints, textures and light — and those instincts inform everything we do, from the way we detail a window reveal to how we think about the junction between old stone and new. The Deerings, a certified Passivhaus home in Hertfordshire, 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 restoration of The Old Water Tower was shortlisted for the RIBA South Awards in 2016, and our work has been featured in Dezeen, Grand Designs Magazine and The Modern House Journal. I am a member of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings and the Passivhaus Trust, accredited by The Green Register, and in 2025 I was invited to judge the British Homes Awards. What connects all of this is a conviction that architecture should be comfortable, designed to last, and built to use energy and materials as efficiently as possible — whether the project involves a listed farmhouse that has stood since the seventeenth century or a new home designed to the highest performance standards from day one.
Chalk, Sarsen and Centuries of Craft in Broad Hinton
Renovations in Broad Hinton mean working with buildings that carry several centuries of material in their walls. Manor Farmhouse, a Grade II listed building on Broad Town Road, is a case in point: a late seventeenth-century house with diaper brick refacing over stone, ashlar quoins, and a stone rear wing, reputed to incorporate masonry from an earlier manor house said to have been built around 1540 and destroyed during the Civil War. Renovating buildings with this kind of layered fabric demands patience and an architect's eye for what is structural, what is decorative, and what is evidence — understanding how each phase of construction relates to the next and where modern comfort can be introduced without disrupting the logic of the whole. Wiltshire Council manages planning and listed building consent for the village, and their conservation officers rightly expect proposals that demonstrate this depth of understanding.
EnerPHit offers a way to dramatically improve thermal performance without erasing the character that makes these buildings worth keeping. The chalk rubble and sarsen walls that give Broad Hinton its identity offer little insulation by modern standards — a problem the Passivhaus Institute's EnerPHit standard was designed to solve. Internal insulation, improved airtightness, mechanical ventilation with heat recovery: all detailed carefully to work with what the building already is. For the seventeenth-century farmhouses and thatched cottages along the village streets, this can mean the difference between a house that draughts and damps and one that is warm, quiet and economical to run — while looking from the street exactly as it has always done.
When designing an extension in Broad Hinton, the mixed material palette — chalk and sarsen rubble, timber frame, brick, thatch — offers something many villages do not: permission to combine. The buildings here have always drawn on what was at hand, and that tradition of mixing materials honestly gives an architect more to work with. An Extension Design that picks up the chalk rubble of the original can work beautifully; so can one that introduces timber or zinc with an honest, legible join. What matters is understanding the particular building, the way the household uses its space, and the setting within the North Wessex Downs that surrounds it.
Sustainable Design is the principle that runs through everything we do — it is not an add-on but the lens through which we think about materials, energy, comfort and longevity. For homes in Broad Hinton, that might mean a renovation that halves a building's energy use, an extension built from responsibly sourced timber, or a New Build Design that meets PassivHaus Design standards from the outset and sits comfortably within the North Wessex Downs National Landscape. And for exceptional sites in the open countryside around the village, Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework provides a route to a new dwelling — provided the design is truly outstanding, raises the standard of architecture in the area, and significantly enhances its immediate setting.
If you are considering a project in Broad Hinton — whether renewing a building whose walls hold four centuries of material, extending a home to work better for the way you live now, or bringing an older house up to a modern standard of comfort — we would welcome the conversation.