Stanley Spencer called Cookham "a village in heaven," and when you walk through the High Street toward the river, you begin to understand what he meant. It is not a grand place. The scale is modest — two-storey cottages, brick and flint walls, rooflines that sit low against the sky. But there is something in the way the village meets the Thames, the way the churchyard of Holy Trinity opens out toward the water meadows, that gives even the smallest buildings a kind of quiet authority. Spencer painted biblical scenes into these streets because he saw the sacred in the ordinary, and I think architecture at its best does something similar: it takes the everyday — a doorway, a window, a roof — and gives it meaning through proportion, material and care. That is what draws me to working in places like Cookham, where every intervention has to earn its place among buildings that have been getting it right for centuries.
Award-winning Architects in Cookham
Trusted Expertise for a Cherished Village
Gresford Architects was founded in London in 2006 and is now based in Oxford, working with clients across the country. Our work has been recognised with a RIBA East Award for The Deerings, a Passivhaus home in Hertfordshire, and a RIBA South Awards shortlist for The Old Water Tower. I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the 2018 Building Design Awards and a judge at the 2025 British Homes Awards. Our projects have been featured in Dezeen, Grand Designs Magazine, The Modern House Journal and The Spaces. As a member of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, I bring a particular sensitivity to heritage contexts — the kind of care that a village like Cookham, with its conservation area designated in 1969 and its wealth of listed buildings dating from the sixteenth century onward, genuinely requires. We are RIBA chartered, ARB registered, and members of the Passivhaus Trust and The Green Register, which means our approach spans heritage sensitivity at one end and cutting-edge energy performance at the other.
How We Work with Homes in Cookham
Cookham's conservation area encompasses much of the village centre, and the buildings within it — from the Grade II* listed Holy Trinity Church, with its twelfth-century origins and west tower added around 1500, to the sixteenth-century cottages around Hardings Green Common — represent a rich and varied architectural inheritance. Renovations in this context demand more than good taste. They require an understanding of historic construction methods, original materials and the way a building was intended to work before modern interventions changed its behaviour. As a SPAB member, I approach every renovation with respect for what is already there, finding ways to improve comfort and function without erasing the qualities that make the building worth keeping. Planning applications in Cookham are determined by the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead, and the Cookham Neighbourhood Plan, adopted in 2025, adds a further layer of locally specific design guidance that shapes what is possible.
For the older homes in Cookham that struggle with draughts, damp and high energy bills, EnerPHit offers a rigorous, certified route to dramatically better thermal performance. This is the Passivhaus Institute's retrofit standard, and it is particularly well suited to heritage properties because it works with the existing building rather than against it — improving the thermal envelope, addressing air tightness, upgrading ventilation — all while preserving the character and proportions that matter. We applied these principles to The Old Orchard in Oxfordshire, transforming the building's comfort, energy use and running costs. For a period cottage in Cookham, the same discipline can make the difference between a home that is beautiful to look at but expensive and uncomfortable to live in, and one that is both.
Extension Design is equally relevant in a village like Cookham, where buildings are tightly knit and the predominant scale is modest. Many homes were built when families were larger, living more formally — now people work from home, need flexible ground-floor space, want a stronger connection between interior and garden. The challenge in Cookham is sharpened by the conservation area rules and the visual continuity of the High Street: an extension has to sit comfortably within the building's original material grammar. Brick, flint, rendered wall finish — whatever the host building uses — must inform the design. Pitch, eaves and window proportions need answering to. A well-designed extension responds to all of that without pastiche, strengthening the building rather than merely adding to it. Sustainable Design runs through every project we take on, treating sustainability not as a checklist but as the discipline that produces better architecture: homes that are comfortable to inhabit, economical to run and built to last.
For sites in the countryside surrounding Cookham, including land within the Green Belt, New Build Design and PassivHaus Design allow us to create homes from the ground up that deliver outstanding thermal comfort, excellent air quality and very low running costs. Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework provides a route for truly exceptional homes in rural settings — architecture that responds to and enhances the landscape rather than simply occupying it. In a setting shaped by the Thames, chalk hills and ancient commons, that is a brief that rewards ambition tempered by sensitivity.
If you are considering a project in Cookham — whether it is a sensitive renovation, a retrofit that transforms how your home performs, or an extension that makes your house work the way you need it to — we would welcome the conversation.