There is something quietly remarkable about a village that carved a horse into its hillside. The Broad Town White Horse, cut into the chalk slope in 1864 and restored by the community in 1991 with some 180 tonnes of fresh chalk, tells you a great deal about how people here feel about their landscape — not just as scenery but as something to be shaped, maintained and handed on. I see the same instinct in the village's built fabric. Christ Church, raised in ashlar Bath stone between 1844 and 1846 with its lancet windows and bellcote, stands with a quiet confidence that comes from using the right material for the right purpose. A few hundred yards away, the farmhouses that anchor the older parts of the village — Broad Town Farmhouse, a seventeenth-century house where the poet Geoffrey Grigson lived for forty years, Great Cotmarsh Farmhouse with its early eighteenth-century Flemish bond brickwork diapered with vitrified headers — speak a different architectural language entirely, one of local brick, stone quoins and stone slate roofs. The variety is the point. This is a village where each generation built with care and with the materials their era could provide.
Award-winning Architects in Broad Town
Why Clients Across the Country Trust Gresford Architects
Gresford Architects was founded in London in 2006 and is now based in Oxford, working with clients across the country. I am a RIBA Chartered and ARB Registered architect, a member of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, and accredited by The Green Register — credentials that shape every project we take on, whether that involves a listed farmhouse or a contemporary new build. Our Passivhaus home The Deerings won the RIBA East Award in 2018, and I was shortlisted for the RIBA South Awards for The Old Water Tower in 2016. Our work has appeared in Dezeen, Grand Designs Magazine and The Modern House Journal, and I served as a judge at the British Homes Awards in 2025. We are members of the Passivhaus Trust not because low-energy design is a specialism we offer on request, but because we believe every home should be comfortable, efficient and designed to last.
How We Work with Homes in Broad Town
Extension Design in a village like Broad Town requires an architect who understands how to work alongside buildings of very different ages and characters. The older farmhouses along the village's lanes — stone slate roofs, brick and stone construction, proportions set two or three centuries ago — sit near more recent homes from the twentieth century with different plot sizes, materials and orientations. Extending any of these properties means thinking carefully about scale, roofline and material palette so that new work sits comfortably within its immediate setting. Whether that is a contemporary garden-room extension to a post-war home or a more traditional addition to one of the older properties, we design each extension to feel like it belongs — considered, proportionate and properly detailed. Wiltshire Council, as the local planning authority, will assess any application against the character of the village, and we ensure our proposals respond to that context from the outset.
Renovations to the listed farmhouses in Broad Town demand a particular kind of care. A building like Broad Town Farmhouse, dating from the seventeenth century, carries centuries of alteration in its fabric — each layer tells you something about how the building has been used, adapted and maintained. Great Cotmarsh Farmhouse, with its diapered brickwork and stone quoins on the early eighteenth-century main block and a later wing added around 1840, presents a different set of challenges: the two phases of construction respond differently to moisture, movement and thermal stress. My membership of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings informs every decision we make on historic fabric, from the choice of lime mortar to the sequencing of repairs. These are Grade II listed buildings, and any work requires listed building consent from Wiltshire Council — a process we navigate regularly and with confidence.
Sustainable Design runs through everything we do at Gresford Architects, and in Broad Town it connects directly to the village's own building tradition. The stone slates on its older roofs, the bricks fired and laid in Flemish bond with vitrified headers for weather resistance, the ashlar Bath stone of Christ Church — these were materials chosen for durability, performance and economy of means. We work in the same spirit, using modern building physics and fabric-first principles to create homes that are comfortable to live in, economical to run and as light on resources as possible. PassivHaus Design takes this to its highest certified standard, delivering homes with exceptional thermal performance and minimal energy bills. EnerPHit, the Passivhaus Institute's retrofit standard, offers the same rigour applied to existing buildings — particularly relevant for the older homes in Broad Town where conventional insulation approaches risk trapping moisture in historic wall build-ups. For new homes, New Build Design allows us to achieve the most demanding performance standards from the ground up. And for exceptional sites in the open Wiltshire countryside beyond the village, Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework provides a route to a truly outstanding dwelling where standard planning policy might not permit development.
If you are considering a project in Broad Town — whether extending a family home, renovating a listed farmhouse, or building something new that belongs in this landscape — we would welcome the conversation.