For centuries, people in Datchet looked across the Thames towards Windsor Castle and took a ferry to reach it. That crossing — replaced by Queen Anne's bridge in 1706 — shaped the village as much as anything built on its own streets. Datchet grew not as an outpost of Windsor but as its own place, modest in scale yet quietly confident in character. Walk around the Green today and you can feel it: the Manor House range with its Victorian mock-Tudor refronting from the 1870s, Church Cottage and the Royal Stag dating back to around 1500, the octagonal tower of St Mary the Virgin rising above the rooftops. There is a self-assuredness here that comes from five hundred years of building and rebuilding on the same ground. As an architect, that continuity is what draws me in — the challenge of adding something new to a place that already knows exactly what it is.
Award-winning Architects in Datchet
Why Homeowners in Datchet Trust Gresford Architects
I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006, and we are now based in Oxford, working with clients across the country. A village like Datchet — layered, characterful, watched over by a conservation area designation since 1995 — is the kind of place where our experience tells. Our project The Deerings, a Passivhaus home in Hertfordshire, won the RIBA East Award in 2018. 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 Building Design Awards in 2018 and was invited to judge the British Homes Awards in 2025. Our work on The Great Barn in Buckinghamshire, a Grade II listed barn restoration, reflects the care we bring to buildings with heritage value — the kind of work that Datchet, with around forty listed buildings across the parish, regularly demands.
We are members of RIBA and the Passivhaus Trust, accredited by The Green Register, and I am a member of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. These affiliations are not just letters after a name. They represent a way of thinking about buildings — as things that should last, perform well, and sit honestly within their surroundings.
Architectural Services Shaped by the Thames and the Green
Extension Design is where many projects in Datchet begin. The village's housing stock spans five centuries — from fifteenth-century timber-framed buildings clustered around the Green to the distinctive two-storey red brick and clay tile terraces along the High Street, to Victorian and twentieth-century additions that pushed development towards the water meadows and the river. Each asks something different of an extension. A rear addition to a red brick Victorian terrace on the High Street needs to respect the steeply pitched rooflines and decorative timber gabling that give the street its rhythm. An extension to one of the older properties within the conservation area, where the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead's planning team will scrutinise every detail, demands an approach that is sympathetic without being imitative. The best extensions in a place like this do not try to hide. They find a material language and a scale that completes what the original builder began.
Renovations in Datchet carry a particular responsibility. When St Mary the Virgin was rebuilt between 1857 and 1860 by the architect Raphael Brandon, the new church gained an octagonal tower — completed in 1864 — that remains one of the village's most distinctive landmarks. That project was a renovation in the fullest sense: understanding what mattered about the existing building, then remaking it with conviction. We approach every renovation with the same question. What does this building want to become? For the listed cottages and farmhouses scattered across the parish, this means reading the structure carefully — understanding how solid walls breathe, how timber frames move, how clay tiles weather — before proposing any intervention.
New Build Design takes on fresh significance in Datchet with the allocation of site AL39 at London Road and Riding Court Road for around eighty new homes under the Borough Local Plan. The Datchet Neighbourhood Plan, adopted in 2023, sets clear expectations for how new development should sit within the village. This is where Sustainable Design becomes essential — not as an afterthought but as the starting principle. We design homes that are comfortable, economical to run, and built to last, using careful orientation, natural ventilation, and materials chosen for their longevity and low environmental impact. In a village with a long history of Thames flooding — documented since the 1600s and including major events in 1774, 1894, and 1947 — sustainable design also means thinking seriously about resilience, drainage, and how a building meets the ground.
EnerPHit is our approach to retrofitting older homes in Datchet to achieve near-Passivhaus levels of comfort and energy efficiency. Many of the village's solid-walled Victorian and Edwardian houses lose heat in ways their builders never anticipated, and EnerPHit addresses this through improved insulation, controlled ventilation, and better airtightness — without stripping away the character that makes these buildings worth keeping. PassivHaus Design sets the benchmark for new construction, ensuring that homes built today perform as well as the best in Europe for warmth, air quality, and running costs.
For sites in the wider landscape beyond the village boundary, Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework provides a route to exceptional rural homes — houses that justify their position through the quality of their design and their relationship with the land around them.
Datchet has been building and rebuilding for half a millennium, always finding its own way in the shadow of something grander across the river. If you are planning a project here — whether extending a family home, renovating a listed building, or contributing to the village's next chapter — we would welcome the conversation.