Some villages grow slowly over centuries, shaped by the same handful of materials and the same patterns of daily life. Burghfield Common is not one of those villages. The settlement we know today took shape largely in the second half of the twentieth century, spreading across the higher ground above the older parish of Burghfield as Reading expanded and the M4 corridor drew people westward. What interests me as an architect is what that pattern of growth means now — because homes built quickly in the 1960s, 70s and 80s were not designed with energy performance or longevity in mind, and many of the people living in them are starting to ask the questions that matter: how do I make this house warmer, cheaper to run, and genuinely comfortable for the next thirty years? That is a design problem, and it is one we find deeply rewarding to solve.
Award-winning Architects in Burghfield Common
Credentials That Matter for Homes in Burghfield Common
I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006, and we now work with clients across the country from our studio in Oxford. We are RIBA chartered and ARB registered, members of the Passivhaus Trust, The Green Register and the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. Our Passivhaus project The Deerings won a RIBA East Award in 2018, the same year I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the Building Design Awards. 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. For homeowners in Burghfield Common, what this means in practice is an architect who understands both performance and craft — someone who can look at a 1970s house and see not just what it is, but what it could become.
Improving and Extending Homes in Burghfield Common
Much of the housing stock in Burghfield Common dates from the decades of rapid expansion — brick-built, tile-roofed, functional but rarely designed with the kind of care that makes a home genuinely comfortable over time. Renovations of these properties offer enormous scope. Walls that were built without cavity insulation, windows that leak heat, layouts that made sense for a different era of family life — all of these can be rethought and improved. EnerPHit, the Passivhaus Institute's retrofit standard, provides a rigorous framework for this kind of transformation: improved airtightness, high-performance glazing, mechanical ventilation with heat recovery, and carefully detailed insulation that eliminates cold bridges. We applied these principles to our own project The Old Orchard in Oxfordshire, and the difference in comfort and running costs is something you feel the moment you walk through the door. Sustainable Design is the thread that runs through all of it — not as a label, but as the discipline that ensures every decision serves the building and the people inside it.
Extension Design is where many projects in Burghfield Common begin. A family that has outgrown its kitchen, a couple who need a home office that actually works, a ground-floor extension that opens the house to the garden — these are familiar briefs, but they deserve the same quality of thought as any new building. We design extensions that improve the whole house, not just add square footage. Planning applications in Burghfield Common are determined by West Berkshire Council, and the parish has been developing its own Neighbourhood Plan to guide future growth. Working within that framework is part of what we do — understanding local policy before putting pen to paper, so the planning process becomes a conversation rather than a confrontation.
The parish has older fabric too, and it deserves a different kind of attention. The Grade II listed Church of St Mary the Virgin, built in 1843 by J.B. Clacy in the Romanesque style with a chancel added in 1892 by Bodley and Garner, sits in the historic village of Burghfield below the Common. The Old Manor at Whitehouse Green dates to 1685. The oak-framed well shelter on the village green at The Wells, inscribed to mark the coronation of Edward VII in 1902, is the kind of quiet, well-made structure that tells you something about how a community valued its public spaces. As a member of SPAB, I bring this same respect for existing buildings to every project — whether that is a listed structure requiring specialist knowledge or a mid-century house that simply needs someone to care about getting the details right.
For those with sites in the more rural edges of the parish, New Build Design and PassivHaus Design offer the chance to create something genuinely exceptional from the ground up — a home designed to Passivhaus standards that delivers remarkable comfort, outstanding air quality and energy bills that reshape the economics of daily life. Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework provides a route to building in the open countryside where design quality must be high enough to enhance its setting, and the landscape around Burghfield — the gentle terrain between the Kennet Valley and the higher ground toward Mortimer — rewards architecture that takes its cue from the land rather than ignoring it.
Whether you are improving a twentieth-century home, extending to suit the way you live now, or building something new in Burghfield Common, we would welcome the conversation.