There is something quietly remarkable about a town whose conservation area is not centred on a church or a manor house but on a shoe factory and the terraces built for its workers. Desborough's protected heritage is industrial — the former Lawrence's boot and shoe factory on Station Road, the rows of workers' housing along New Street and Gladstone Street, the modest but purposeful streetscape of a community that grew around making things. Joseph Cheaney and Sons have been crafting shoes on the same site since 1896, their Grade II listed factory still in production, still turning leather into something that lasts. That continuity of craft — the idea that a building can serve the same purpose for over a century because it was designed with care in the first place — is something I think about often. It is, in many ways, the principle that underpins everything we do at Gresford Architects: design with honesty, build to endure, and respect the relationship between how a building looks and how it works.
Award-winning Architects in Desborough
Why Homeowners in Desborough Trust Gresford Architects
I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006, and we are now based in Oxford, working with clients across the country. Desborough is a place that rewards careful attention — its character comes not from grand architecture but from the honest, well-made buildings that its industries produced, and from a Grade I listed church in St Giles that has stood on Lower Street since the thirteenth century. Working in a town like this requires an architect who understands both the industrial heritage of the conservation area and the quieter, older fabric of the medieval core. We are RIBA chartered and ARB registered, and my membership of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings informs how I approach every project involving historic fabric — listening to what a building tells you before proposing any change. Our work on The Great Barn, a Grade II listed barn restoration in Buckinghamshire, and The Old Orchard, an EnerPHit retrofit in Oxfordshire featured in The Modern House and The Spaces, reflects the range of historic contexts we work within. In 2018, The Deerings — our certified Passivhaus home in Hertfordshire — won the RIBA East Award, and I was recognised as a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the Building Design Awards. In 2025 I was invited to judge the British Homes Awards, a role that confirmed what I already believed: the best homes are those where comfort, performance, and beauty are treated as inseparable.
Architectural Services for Homes in Desborough
Extension Design is often the most transformative thing we do for families in Desborough. The workers' terraces along New Street, Mansefield Close and Gladstone Street — built to house the boot and shoe workforce in the late nineteenth century — are compact, well-proportioned homes that were designed for a different era of family life. Many of them sit on plots with enough space at the rear to add a single-storey extension that opens the ground floor to light and garden, or a first-floor addition that gives a growing family the bedroom they need without leaving a neighbourhood they love. The ambition is always the same: to create space that feels generous and connected, that brings daylight deep into the plan, and that respects the scale and rhythm of the existing street. In the conservation area, that means thinking carefully about materials and form, ensuring that any addition sits comfortably alongside the red brick and modest detailing of the original terraces.
EnerPHit, the Passivhaus Institute's certified retrofit standard, offers homeowners in Desborough the most rigorous route to improving the thermal performance of solid-walled homes. The terraced housing stock that defines so much of the town — red brick, solid walls, often with original sash windows — was built without insulation and can be expensive to heat, draughty in winter and uncomfortably warm in summer. EnerPHit addresses these problems systematically: carefully designed insulation that works with the existing wall construction rather than against it, airtightness improvements, mechanical ventilation with heat recovery, and high-performance windows that can be specified to match historic profiles where the conservation area demands it. The result is a home that feels entirely different to live in — warm, quiet, comfortable — while looking much the same from the street. Our EnerPHit work on The Old Orchard demonstrated that this level of transformation is achievable without erasing a building's character, and the same principles apply to the honest, well-built terraces in Desborough.
Renovations in the conservation area require a particular sensitivity to what makes these buildings significant. The Lawrence's factory site and surrounding workers' housing were designated as a conservation area in 2007 precisely because they tell the story of Desborough's industrial past — the relationship between workplace and home, the planned estate that grew out of the boot and shoe trade. Renovating a property in this context means understanding that significance and working within it: choosing materials that complement the existing palette of red brick and slate, retaining original features where they survive, and finding ways to improve how a home functions without breaking the connection to the streetscape that gives the area its character. North Northamptonshire Council manages planning for Desborough, and any work in the conservation area requires engagement with their conservation officers. Our experience with listed buildings and sensitive historic contexts — including my SPAB membership and our work on projects like The Great Barn — gives us the confidence to navigate that process thoroughly.
Sustainable Design runs through every project we take on, but it carries particular weight in a town where significant new housing is planned. The North Northamptonshire Joint Core Strategy allocated 1,360 new homes for Desborough between 2011 and 2031, and large sites including The Grange and land off Harborough Road are delivering that growth. New Build Design for these expanding areas of the town gives us the opportunity to do things properly from the start — orientation for passive solar gain, insulation to high standards, materials chosen for their durability and environmental performance as much as their appearance. PassivHaus Design takes this further, creating homes that need almost no active heating because their fabric, windows and ventilation work as a single, precisely calibrated system. The Deerings in Hertfordshire proved that a certified Passivhaus home can be beautiful, comfortable and extraordinarily efficient — the kind of home that costs almost nothing to heat. For the open countryside around Desborough, Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework provides a demanding but rewarding route for exceptional new homes in the rural landscape, where the architecture must demonstrate genuine quality and sensitivity to the character of its setting.
Desborough has always been a town that understands making — from the boot-makers who have crafted shoes at Joseph Cheaney and Sons for over a century, to the builders of the Victorian terraces who understood that a well-made home endures. That principle — that craft, materials and purpose matter — is what we bring to every project here. Whether you are extending a terraced home in the conservation area, improving the comfort and efficiency of a solid-walled house, or building something new on the edge of town, we would welcome the conversation.