There is something quietly revelatory about a village built from the ground it sits on. In Compton, the chalk and flint of the Berkshire Downs are not just geology — they are the walls of the church, the rubble cores of old cottages, the dressings around windows and doorways that have watched over the Pang valley for centuries. Walk along the High Street and you see it in the flint facework of St Mary and St Nicholas, where a thirteenth-century tower still anchors the village to its earliest incarnation. The Ridgeway passes through the parish above, Roman remains lie beneath, and between the two sits a settlement whose building materials have barely changed in eight hundred years. As an architect, that continuity between landscape and construction is endlessly compelling — and it poses a very particular design challenge. Anything new here must understand the material language of chalk downland before it earns the right to speak.
Award-winning Architects in Compton
An Architect's Practice Rooted in Sensitive Design
I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006, and we are now based in Oxford, working with clients across the country. Villages like Compton — set within a designated National Landscape, shaped by a conservation area, and built from materials that demand respect — are where our particular expertise comes into its own. Our restoration of The Great Barn in Buckinghamshire, a Grade II listed barn, required the same attentiveness to historic fabric and local building traditions that projects in Compton's conservation area call for. The Deerings, a Passivhaus home in Hertfordshire, won the RIBA East Award in 2018, demonstrating that high performance and architectural quality are not competing ambitions. I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the Building Design Awards in 2018 and was invited to judge the British Homes Awards in 2025.
We are members of RIBA and the Passivhaus Trust, I am a member of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, and we are accredited by The Green Register. In a village where the chalk beneath your feet is the same chalk in the walls around you, that sensitivity to materials, performance, and place is not optional. It is the starting point.
Architectural Services for a Chalk Downland Village
Renovations in Compton often begin with flint. The village's conservation area, designated in 1984, covers the historic core along the High Street, Cheap Street, and Horn Street, and within it the listed buildings tell the story of a place built and rebuilt from the same materials over centuries. The Church of St Mary and St Nicholas is the most prominent example — its nave and chancel substantially restored in the mid-nineteenth century, a north aisle added by John Oldrid Scott in 1905, all in flint with stone dressings that sit honestly against the thirteenth-century tower. Renovating buildings of this kind means reading the structure with care: understanding how chalk rubble walls behave, how flint facework weathers, how lime mortars breathe. We approach each renovation asking what the building wants to become, working with the existing fabric rather than against it, and ensuring that any intervention respects the craft traditions that shaped these buildings in the first place.
New Build Design takes on real significance in Compton with the former Pirbright Institute site, where hybrid planning permission exists for up to 160 new homes along with employment space and green areas. This is a substantial development within a village of modest scale, and the Compton Neighbourhood Development Plan — adopted after its 2022 referendum — sets clear expectations for how new construction should sit within the wider landscape. West Berkshire Council, as the local planning authority, will scrutinise proposals carefully given the site's position within the North Wessex Downs National Landscape. Any new homes here should respond to the chalk downland setting, drawing on the local materials palette — flint, brick, tile, and timber — rather than importing a suburban language that ignores the village's character.
Sustainable Design is not an add-on in a place like Compton; it is the logical continuation of how this village has always built. The chalk and flint that local builders quarried from the land around them were, in their own way, a sustainable choice — local, durable, low in embodied energy. We carry that principle forward with contemporary methods: careful orientation, high-performance insulation, natural ventilation strategies, and materials selected for longevity and environmental impact. Homes that are comfortable, economical to run, and designed to last are not a departure from Compton's building tradition. They are its natural evolution.
Extension Design in the conservation area requires a dialogue with the existing building that goes beyond matching materials. An extension to one of the older cottages along Cheap Street or Horn Street must respond to the scale, roofline, and fenestration of the original, while a more modern addition to a twentieth-century property at the village edges has greater freedom to express itself. In both cases, we look for the approach that completes what the original builder began — not imitation, but a confident continuation that earns its place.
EnerPHit offers a route to transforming the thermal performance of older homes in Compton without sacrificing the character that makes them worth keeping. Many of the village's solid-walled cottages lose heat through the same chalk rubble walls that give them their beauty, and EnerPHit addresses this through careful insulation, controlled ventilation, and improved airtightness — all calibrated to the specific construction of each building. PassivHaus Design sets the benchmark for any new construction, ensuring homes built today achieve outstanding levels of comfort, air quality, and energy efficiency.
For sites in the open downland beyond the village boundary, Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework provides a pathway to truly exceptional rural homes — houses that justify their place in the landscape through the quality of their design and their relationship with the chalk hills, dry valleys, and ancient trackways that define this part of Berkshire.
Compton has been built from its own ground for the better part of a millennium, and the best architecture here will always be the kind that understands that relationship between land and building. If you are considering a project in the village — whether renovating a listed cottage, extending a family home, or contributing to the next chapter of development on the Pirbright site — we would welcome the conversation.