Most villages in Wiltshire announce themselves in stone. Dilton Marsh does not. Walk along the High Street here and what you notice first are the red brick frontages and the unusually deep front gardens — cottages set well back from the road, with long plots stretching between the pavement and the front door. This is not a random quirk of layout. When the enclosure award for Westbury and Dilton was made in 1808, the land between the road and the cottages built on the waste was granted to each household, creating the long garden plots that still define the village today. Look more carefully at the cottages themselves and you start to read the trade that built them: wide windows beneath which handloom weavers once worked, front walls of red brick with rubble construction behind, and on the north side of the road a terrace of four two-storey weavers' cottages ending in a double-fronted master's house with a two-storey workshop behind it, its wide windows lighting the looms on both floors. Dilton Marsh grew because people made cloth here, and the architecture still carries the proportions of that work. As an architect, I find that honesty compelling — buildings shaped not by fashion or display but by the practical demands of the lives they housed.
Award-winning Architects in Dilton Marsh
Sustainable Architecture Rooted in Practice
I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006 and we are now based in Oxford, working with clients across the country on projects where sustainability, heritage sensitivity and design ambition come together. I am ARB-registered, RIBA Chartered, and accredited by The Green Register. Our Passivhaus home The Deerings won the RIBA East Award, and I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the 2018 Building Design Awards. I served as a judge for the British Homes Awards in 2025, and I am a member of both the Passivhaus Trust and the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. That combination matters in a village like Dilton Marsh, where a nineteenth-century weaver's cottage and a twenty-first-century housing estate sit within the same parish, each presenting different design questions but sharing the same need for thoughtful, efficient architecture.
Designing for Homes in Dilton Marsh
Extension Design in Dilton Marsh often begins with those long front gardens. The deep plots that the enclosure award created give many homes generous space to the front and rear, and the question becomes how to make an extension work with the existing building's proportions. For the older red brick cottages along the High Street — symmetrical windows, a central door, the occasional trace of a wider weaving window — extending to the rear allows the street frontage to remain intact while opening the house to the garden behind. The later housing estates at Clay Close, Shepherds Mead and Greenacres present different opportunities: side-return extensions, single-storey rear additions, or first-floor extensions that add a bedroom without consuming garden space. Whether matching the red brick and tile of an older cottage or introducing a contemporary material palette that creates an honest distinction between old and new, each extension must sit naturally alongside its host building. Wiltshire Council is the planning authority, and the village's adopted Neighbourhood Development Plan sets local design expectations that any extension must respect.
EnerPHit is the retrofit standard we apply to the solid-walled properties that form the older core of Dilton Marsh. A red brick cottage built for a handloom weaver was not designed with thermal performance in mind — those wide workshop windows are single-glazed and draughty, the solid walls have no cavity, and the rubble construction behind the brick frontage creates cold bridges felt in every room. EnerPHit addresses this systematically: internal insulation detailed to manage moisture at the brick-insulation interface, high-performance glazing within the existing reveals, improved airtightness, and mechanical ventilation with heat recovery. The result is a home that is warmer, quieter, and far less expensive to heat — without altering the red brick character that makes these cottages part of the village's story.
Renovations for the older buildings in Dilton Marsh require an understanding of how they were put together. Bridge Farmhouse, a Grade II listed building dating from the mid-seventeenth century, is a reminder that the village's built heritage extends well beyond the weaving period. The Grade I listed St Mary's Church at Old Dilton, with its fourteenth-century porch and fifteenth-century nave, stands as one of the most complete medieval interiors in Wiltshire — its box pews, three-decker pulpit and galleries largely unchanged since the eighteenth century. Working near buildings of this significance means understanding the materials and methods that made them. My membership of SPAB reflects that approach: we treat every phase of a building's life as part of its value, rather than stripping back to an imagined original.
Sustainable Design runs through everything we do, from the orientation of a new window to the specification of insulation in a roof. PassivHaus Design takes this to its most rigorous expression, delivering homes that maintain stable, comfortable temperatures year-round through exceptional fabric performance — buildings that are not only kinder to the planet but more comfortable to inhabit, more economical to run and more joyful to live in. For New Build Design on a site in or around Dilton Marsh, the Trowbridge bat mitigation strategy is a material planning consideration, requiring proposals to demonstrate no adverse effect on the Bath and Bradford-on-Avon Bats Special Area of Conservation. Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework governs new dwellings in the open countryside beyond the settlement boundary, demanding truly outstanding design that enhances its immediate setting.
If you are considering a project in Dilton Marsh — whether extending a cottage on one of those long garden plots, bringing an older home up to modern comfort through retrofit, or navigating the planning requirements for something new — we would welcome the conversation. A village that built itself around the honest demands of a working trade deserves architecture that continues in the same spirit.