There are clay pits on Downley Common where brickmakers once dug the raw material for the buildings around them. The kilns are long gone, but the evidence of what they produced is everywhere — brick and flint cottages along Littleworth Road, the walls of the old school built in the 1870s, the fabric of a village that quite literally grew from its own ground. The beechwoods that fringe the common supplied the chair bodgers who turned legs on their pole lathes among the trees. Clay became brick. Timber became furniture. And the common itself — twenty-two hectares of open grassland and woodland, medieval in origin — remained at the centre of it all, the one piece of Downley that nobody built on. It is this relationship between land and making that draws me to the village: a place where the materials were always local, always honest, and the architecture that resulted has a directness that no amount of specification writing can replicate.
Award-winning Architects in Downley
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 nationwide. We are ARB registered and RIBA Chartered, members of the Passivhaus Trust and The Green Register, and my membership of SPAB — the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings — reflects a deep conviction that understanding what already exists is the starting point for any good intervention. Our Passivhaus home in Hertfordshire, The Deerings, won a 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 in 2025 I served as a judge at the British Homes Awards. Our work has been published in Dezeen, Grand Designs Magazine and The Modern House Journal — but what matters most is the quality of what gets built, and the care we bring to each project from first conversation to completion.
Architecture Rooted in the Chilterns
Extension Design is where many families in Downley begin. The village sits high in the Chilterns, overlooking High Wycombe, with roughly seventy-three per cent of the parish within the Chilterns National Landscape and the Downley Common Conservation Area protecting the historic heart — the common itself, the surrounding lanes, and the older buildings that define its character. The housing stock ranges from seventeenth-century brick and flint cottages near the common to twentieth-century homes built as the village grew. Many of these houses were designed for smaller households and simpler needs. We design extensions that bring daylight deeper into existing plans, connect living spaces to gardens, and use materials that belong to the street — brick and flint where the older buildings set the tone, timber and clay tile where the Chilterns palette demands it. In a conservation area and within the National Landscape, getting the scale, materials and roofline right is not decoration — it is the difference between an extension that enhances the streetscape and one that undermines it.
Renovations run deep in our practice. My wife Phoebe is a conservation architect, and her influence has shaped the way I approach existing buildings — with patience, with curiosity, and with a respect for what the original builders intended. In Downley, where Blacksmiths Cottage near the top of the common dates from as early as the twelfth or thirteenth century and the Le De Spencers Arms carries seventeenth-century fabric, renovation is not simply about updating interiors. It is about reading the building: understanding where lime mortars are needed rather than cement, where earlier structures sit within later additions, where a lighter touch achieves more than wholesale change.
EnerPHit, our certified retrofit approach, is particularly relevant for older homes in Downley. Many of the brick and flint buildings that give the village its character were built without any concept of thermal performance. EnerPHit addresses this by upgrading insulation, sealing the building envelope and introducing mechanical ventilation with heat recovery — delivering stable indoor temperatures and significantly lower energy bills while the building itself, the one the street has always known, remains unchanged from the outside. For a Chilterns cottage with solid walls and single-glazed windows, the transformation in comfort is remarkable.
Sustainable Design runs through everything we do. We approach every project with the principle that buildings should be comfortable, designed to last, and use energy and materials as efficiently as possible. PassivHaus Design takes this to its most rigorous conclusion — homes with exceptionally low energy demand achieved through precision-engineered airtightness, continuous insulation and the elimination of thermal bridges. New Build Design offers the chance to start from first principles, orienting a home to its specific plot within the Chilterns landscape, responding to topography and views rather than repeating a standard house type. For those with ambitions beyond the village boundary, Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework provides a route for truly exceptional homes in open countryside, where the quality of architecture and its sensitivity to the surrounding landscape earns its place among the beechwoods and chalk hills.
Whether you are extending a family home near the common, renovating one of the brick and flint buildings that give Downley its character, or planning something new within the Chilterns, we would welcome the conversation. The brickmakers dug their clay from the common and built with what the land gave them. Good architecture still starts the same way — by understanding the ground beneath your feet.