There is a moment, walking into Holy Cross Church in Daventry, when you realise that someone in a modest eighteenth-century market town had extraordinary architectural ambition. David Hiorne of Warwick designed the church between 1752 and 1758 in a confident classical style influenced by James Gibbs — the architect of St Martin-in-the-Fields in London — and built it from the warm brown ironstone that gives the town centre its character. A balustrade runs along every parapet. The proportions are generous, considered, deliberate. It is the only eighteenth-century town church in Northamptonshire, and what strikes me most is not the style itself but the conviction behind it: a community choosing to invest in architecture that would outlast fashions and serve generations. That conviction — that buildings should be made with care, built to endure, and designed to lift the spirits of the people who use them — is exactly what drives our work at Gresford Architects.
Award-winning Architects in Daventry
Why Clients Across the Country Trust Gresford
I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006, and we are now based in Oxford, working with clients across the country. What began as a small studio has grown into an award-winning practice with a deep commitment to sustainability and a genuine love of craftsmanship. We are RIBA chartered and ARB registered, and I am a member of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings — something that matters when working with the kind of historic fabric that Daventry's conservation area demands. The Deerings, a certified Passivhaus home in Hertfordshire, won the RIBA East Award in 2018, and that same year I was named a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the Building Design Awards. As a member of the Passivhaus Trust and The Green Register, and as a judge at the 2025 British Homes Awards, I bring both the technical knowledge and the design sensibility that homes in Daventry — whether Georgian, Victorian, or brand new — deserve. My wife Phoebe is a conservation architect, and her influence has deepened my respect for working with historic buildings rather than against them: understanding what a place has been before deciding what it might become.
Architectural Services for Homes in Daventry
Extension Design is where many families in Daventry will find the most immediate opportunity to improve how they live. The town's housing stock is remarkably layered — from the ironstone buildings around the High Street and Sheaf Street that form the conservation area, through Victorian and Edwardian terraces, to the substantial post-war and late twentieth-century estates that expanded the town to the north, east, and south. Each era presents different structural opportunities and constraints. A rear extension on a Victorian terrace near the conservation area requires a different sensibility from a side extension on a 1960s semi in one of the newer estates, but both share the same design ambition: to create space that feels generous, light-filled, and connected to the life of the household. In the conservation area itself, where the Grade II* listed Wheatsheaf Hotel on Sheaf Street — a coaching inn where Charles I stayed before the Battle of Naseby in 1645 — sets the tone for the street, any extension must be sensitive to its context without being timid. Good design does not imitate the past; it respects it while building honestly for the present.
Sustainable Design runs through every project we take on, but it carries particular weight in a town that is about to grow significantly. West Northamptonshire Council, which manages planning for Daventry, has allocated land for around 1,500 new homes across three sites, including approximately 1,100 homes off Stefen Way to the south-west and 250 at Micklewell Park to the north. Growth on this scale raises the question that matters most to us: will these new homes be comfortable, durable, and efficient, or will they be built to the minimum standard the regulations allow? Sustainability is not a constraint — it is an opportunity to create homes that are kinder to the planet, more economical to run, and more joyful to live in. Every project we design begins with energy strategy, orientation, and the relationship between the building and its site, because getting these fundamentals right determines whether a home will perform well for decades or need costly remediation within a generation.
EnerPHit, the Passivhaus Institute's certified retrofit standard, offers homeowners in Daventry's older housing stock the most rigorous route to transforming thermal performance. The ironstone and brick buildings around the High Street, Market Place, and New Street — many of which sit within the conservation area that protects the town's seventy-four listed buildings and groups — were built with solid walls, limited insulation, and single-glazed windows. They are beautiful, characterful, and often bitterly cold in winter. EnerPHit addresses this systematically: insulation, airtightness, mechanical ventilation with heat recovery, and high-performance windows, all designed as an integrated system so that the house maintains stable, comfortable temperatures with a fraction of the energy input. Our EnerPHit work on The Old Orchard in Oxfordshire demonstrated that a rigorous retrofit can transform a building's performance without erasing its character — the timber cladding and careful detailing earned coverage in The Modern House and The Spaces. For listed or conservation-area properties in Daventry, this heritage-sensitive approach is essential: improving the building's performance while preserving the ironstone facades and architectural details that give the town centre its identity.
New Build Design matters for anyone building on the allocated development sites or on individual plots around the town. Renovations bring fresh life to homes whose layouts no longer suit the way families live today — opening up ground floors, improving natural light, reconfiguring circulation so that spaces flow rather than fragment. PassivHaus Design brings the same certified rigour as EnerPHit but applied to new construction, creating homes that need almost no active heating because their walls, windows, and ventilation are designed as a single, precisely calibrated system. For the countryside surrounding Daventry — where Borough Hill rises to the east, its Iron Age earthworks and former BBC transmitter site a reminder of how long this landscape has drawn people to high ground — Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework provides a demanding but rewarding route for exceptional new homes in the rural landscape, where architecture must demonstrate genuine quality and sensitivity to its setting.
Daventry has always been a town that aims higher than its size might suggest — from a Georgian church built with the confidence of a city, to a hilltop that broadcast to the world. Whether you are extending a home in the conservation area, building on one of the new development sites, or retrofitting an ironstone terrace to perform as well as it deserves, we would welcome the conversation.