Chesham is a town that owes its existence to water. The River Chess — one of England's rare chalk streams — rises in the hills above and flows through the valley floor, and it was this spring-fed current that drew people here, powered the four mills recorded in Domesday, and later sustained the watercress beds that flourished along its banks well into the twentieth century. What strikes me as an architect walking through Chesham is how clearly you can read that relationship between water, geology and settlement in the fabric of the place. The old town gathers around St Mary's Church and Church Street, where knapped flint walls — the Chilterns' native material, pulled from the chalk that feeds the river — sit alongside brick and limestone dressings in combinations that span eight centuries. The Bury, a handsome Queen Anne house built in 1712 for William Lowndes, Secretary to the Treasury, looks out over the valley with the quiet confidence of a building designed to last. It is a town where the geology runs through everything — the water, the walls, the character of the streets.
Award-winning Architects in Chesham
Sustainability and Conservation, in Balance
I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006, and we now work with clients across the country from our studio in Oxford. I am an ARB registered, RIBA Chartered architect and a member of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings — a combination that reflects our dual commitment to high-performance new design and the thoughtful care of historic buildings. My wife Phoebe is a conservation architect, and her influence has deepened a respect for heritage that runs through everything we do. Our Passivhaus home The Deerings won the RIBA East Award in 2018, and that same year I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the Building Design Awards. Our projects have been published in Dezeen, Grand Designs Magazine and The Modern House Journal. We are members of the Passivhaus Trust and accredited with The Green Register — credentials that speak to a practice built on the conviction that sustainability and beauty are not competing priorities but natural partners.
Architectural Services for a Chilterns Chalk-Stream Town
Renovations in Chesham demand an architect who understands flint. The conservation area covers the historic heart around Church Street and Germain Street, where buildings from the fourteenth century onwards line streets that have barely shifted from their medieval layout. The town's oldest secular building, 54-56 Church Street, dates from the fourteenth century — a hall house with a cross-wing at right angles, its timber frame concealed behind later alterations. Nearby, 1 Blucher Street retains a medieval great hall within its brickwork, and a sixteenth-century gatehouse survives alongside it. St Mary's Church itself is a palimpsest of building campaigns stretching from a twelfth-century Romanesque window in the north transept through thirteenth-century nave arcades to a fifteenth-century clerestory and south porch with a tierceron vault. Working with buildings like these requires patience, a willingness to listen to what the structure is telling you, and the technical knowledge to intervene without erasing what makes them significant. As a SPAB member, I believe the best renovations reveal quality rather than impose it.
A cottage built with chalk rubble and flint — abundant in Chesham, solid in structure, terrible at keeping out the English winter — will feel draughty and damp without serious intervention. EnerPHit, the Passivhaus Institute's retrofit standard, offers a way through this bind: insulation that respects the building's character, careful detailing around flint and lime mortar, airtightness testing, and mechanical ventilation with heat recovery that keeps the air fresh and the fabric dry. The result is a home that is warmer, quieter and dramatically cheaper to run, while the flint walls that have stood for centuries remain exactly what they have always been.
Sustainable Design is not an add-on at Gresford Architects — it is the starting point for every project. In a town whose identity is so closely tied to its chalk stream and the landscape that feeds it, designing sustainably carries a particular weight. The River Chess is one of only around 200 chalk streams in the world, and the ecology of the valley depends on clean water, permeable ground and buildings that sit lightly in their setting. We design homes that use energy and materials as efficiently as possible — comfortable, built to last, and kinder to the landscape that makes Chesham the place it is.
Extension Design is among our most requested services for homeowners in Chesham. The town's housing stock is varied — from the older properties within the conservation area to the Edwardian and inter-war houses that spread along the valley as the Metropolitan Railway brought commuters from the 1880s onwards, and the estates built through the mid and late twentieth century. A thoughtful extension can open up a ground floor to the garden, bring daylight into rooms that the original plan kept dark, or add the space a growing family needs without the upheaval of moving. In Chesham, where the Chilterns rise steeply on either side of the valley, an extension also needs to consider its relationship with the hillside — views, levels, and the way light moves through the day.
A Passivhaus home in Chesham is not a departure from place — it is an intensification of it. The valley that holds the town offers natural shelter from wind; the chalk that feeds the Chess is stable ground underfoot; the careful orientation and superinsulation that define PassivHaus Design work with that generous setting rather than against it. The result is a home that needs almost no heating, sits lightly on the landscape, and proves that extreme comfort and environmental responsibility are not competing ideas but natural partners.
A new home in Chesham must speak the language of the place: flint, brick, tile, and the proportions of streets that have evolved over centuries rather than decades. The town has adopted its own Neighbourhood Plan, approved with 89% support at referendum, which sets out a community-led vision for how Chesham should grow and change. Beyond the old town, the Chilterns National Landscape wraps around Chesham on all sides, shaping what can be built and how sensitively it must respond to its surroundings. New Build Design here means responding to the chalk-stream valley, the Chilterns light, and the rhythm of a town that has always known what good building looks like — and designing something genuinely new that does not feel imported.
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 of outstanding design quality that enhances its setting. The Chilterns landscape around Chesham, with its chalk valleys, beechwood hangers and ancient hedgerows, is a setting that rewards ambition tempered by sensitivity, and we have the experience to navigate that balance.
Chesham's chalk stream still flows, the flint walls still catch the light along Church Street, and the hills still hold the town in their valley. Whether you are renovating a historic building, retrofitting for warmth and efficiency, extending a family home, or designing something entirely new in this remarkable Chilterns setting, we would welcome the conversation.