What strikes me about Christian Malford is how clearly you can read a thousand years of building in a single walk through the village. The Church of All Saints, a Grade I listed building with twelfth-century origins, still carries the tracery of its fourteenth-century east window in the south aisle — ogee-headed lights in fine ashlar — alongside an eighteenth-century tower raised in ashlar with the same quiet confidence that runs through every generation's additions. The Old Rectory, remodelled around 1816 by John Provis, wraps itself around a seventeenth-century cottage at its rear, one era quite literally embracing another. This is a village where adaptation is not an afterthought but a tradition, where each century has found a way to build alongside what came before without erasing it. That instinct — to work with what exists, to understand a building's history before deciding its future — is at the heart of how we practise architecture at Gresford Architects.
Award-winning Architects in Christian Malford
An Award-winning Practice Built on Heritage and Sustainability
I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006, and we are now based in Oxford, working with clients across the country. My membership of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings shapes every conversation we have about older properties — it teaches a philosophy of careful repair and honest alteration that has direct relevance in a village like Christian Malford, where so many buildings carry centuries of fabric. I am a RIBA Chartered and ARB Registered architect, accredited by The Green Register, and a member of the Passivhaus Trust. Our work on The Deerings, a certified Passivhaus home in Hertfordshire, won the RIBA East Award in 2018, and The Old Water Tower was shortlisted for the RIBA South Awards in 2016. I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the 2018 Building Design Awards and served as a judge at the British Homes Awards in 2025. Our projects have been featured in Dezeen, Grand Designs Magazine and The Modern House Journal — work that ranges from sensitive heritage renovations to high-performance new builds.
Designing for Homes in Christian Malford
Renovations are where we feel most at home in a village like Christian Malford, and the reason is simple: the buildings here reward attention. The farmhouses scattered through the parish — Dodford Farmhouse from the late seventeenth century, Thornend Farmhouse built in the eighteenth century and remodelled in the mid-nineteenth, Beanhill Farmhouse from the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century — are constructed in rubble stone with stone slate roofs, materials that breathe and move and need to be understood before they are touched. Renovating these homes means reading their construction honestly, knowing where lime mortar is doing its job and where cement pointing has trapped moisture, understanding how a stone wall manages heat and damp across the seasons. Wiltshire Council, as the local planning authority, will require listed building consent for any works to a listed structure, and we navigate that process with the care and documentation it demands.
EnerPHit, the Passivhaus Institute's retrofit standard, offers something genuinely valuable for older homes in Christian Malford. The challenge with rubble stone walls and stone slate roofs is that conventional insulation approaches — cavity fill, external render systems designed for modern masonry — can cause more harm than good, trapping moisture within a wall build-up that was designed to breathe. EnerPHit provides a rigorous, fabric-first methodology that achieves dramatic improvements in thermal performance while respecting the way historic construction manages moisture. For homeowners in Christian Malford living with draughty rooms and high heating bills in a seventeenth-century farmhouse, EnerPHit offers a path to comfort and efficiency that does not compromise the building's long-term health.
Extension Design in Christian Malford calls for an architect who can judge the right tone. The village's older properties have strong proportions, rubble stone walls and stone slate roofs that establish a clear material language, while more recent homes sit alongside them with different scales and finishes. Extending any of these properties well means understanding not just what the house needs internally but how the addition will read from the lane — its roofline, its materials, its relationship to the existing building. The village's adopted Neighbourhood Development Plan sets clear expectations for how new development should respect the character of the area, and we design with those policies in mind from the earliest sketch. An extension should feel like a natural continuation of a building's life, not an interruption.
Sustainable Design is not a separate service at Gresford Architects — it is how we think about every project in Christian Malford. The farmhouses here, built in rubble stone with stone slate roofs, were designed by their makers to breathe, to manage moisture, to perform well with the materials available to them. We bring that same discipline to new work: fabric-first principles, careful detailing and materials chosen for durability and performance. PassivHaus Design takes this to the highest certified standard — for a new home in or around the village, it means exceptional thermal comfort and minimal energy bills. New Build Design allows us to achieve these demanding performance targets from the ground up, ensuring that new homes sit well within their surroundings and meet the expectations set by Christian Malford's Neighbourhood Development Plan. And for exceptional rural sites in the Wiltshire countryside, Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework can justify a truly outstanding dwelling — a home that could not be built under standard policy, but is justified by its design quality and sensitive response to its setting.
If you are thinking about a project in Christian Malford — whether that means breathing new life into a farmhouse that has stood for three centuries, extending a family home with something that belongs, or building something entirely new — we would welcome the chance to talk.