What I find remarkable about East Garston is how directly the buildings grow from the ground they stand on. The chalk downland that rises above the Lambourn Valley gave the village its flint, its sarsen stone, its chalk block — and these are the materials you see in cottage walls, in boundary structures, and in the fabric of All Saints Church, whose Norman origins reach back to around 1190. Kimber's Farmhouse, a seventeenth-century building of brick and flint under thatch, sits on the same lane where strings of racehorses pass each morning on their way to the gallops. That is the character of East Garston: a village where deep-rooted agricultural and architectural heritage meets the practical rhythms of the Lambourn Valley's racing world, and where the material palette has barely changed in centuries because the geology has not changed either.
Award-winning Architects in East Garston
An Award-Winning Practice Working Across the Country
I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006, and we are now based in Oxford, working with clients across the country. My wife Phoebe is a conservation architect, and her influence deepened what was already a strong instinct toward heritage-sensitive design — something that matters enormously in a village like East Garston, where the conservation area has been in place since 1974 and the listed buildings number in the dozens. I am an ARB-registered and RIBA Chartered Architect, a member of SPAB, the Passivhaus Trust, and The Green Register. Our work on The Deerings, a Passivhaus home in Hertfordshire, won the RIBA East Award. The Old Water Tower was shortlisted for a RIBA South Award, and I was named a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the 2018 Building Design Awards. Dezeen, Grand Designs Magazine, The Modern House Journal, and the RIBA Journal have all featured our projects. What connects all of this work is a conviction that buildings should be comfortable, designed to last, and built to use energy and materials as efficiently as possible — principles that apply as much to a flint-walled cottage in the Lambourn Valley as to a new Passivhaus in open countryside.
Designing for a Downland Village
Renovations in East Garston call for a particular kind of care. The village's older buildings — flint and brick cottages, farmhouses with chalk block detailing, thatched roofs that have been repaired and replaced across generations — are part of a conservation area where materials and craftsmanship carry real weight. West Berkshire Council handles planning here, and any work within the conservation area requires sensitivity to the existing fabric. At All Saints Church, a Victorian restoration left little of the original Norman structure visible apart from the south porch doorway, but Nathaniel Westlake's painted stained glass and the Tree of Jesse wall painting in the nave show what thoughtful later work can add to a building without erasing its history. That is the principle we bring to residential Renovations: understanding what was built, how it was built, and how to improve it without losing the qualities that make it worth keeping. A new kitchen in a flint-walled cottage, a reconfigured first floor in a farmhouse — these are projects where knowledge of traditional construction is not optional, it is the foundation of everything that follows.
EnerPHit is our certified retrofit standard, and it is well suited to the solid-walled homes that characterise much of East Garston. These older buildings — whether the seventeenth-century brick-and-flint structures or the later Victorian and Edwardian properties — lose heat through their fabric in ways that piecemeal insulation rarely resolves. EnerPHit takes a whole-building approach: continuous insulation appropriate to the wall construction, mechanical ventilation with heat recovery, and careful airtightness detailing at junctions. For a village in the North Wessex Downs National Landscape, where many rural homes rely on oil or LPG rather than mains gas, the reduction in heating demand is not just a comfort gain but a significant practical saving. The result is a home that is warmer, quieter, and dramatically cheaper to run — built with the same thoroughness that went into Kimber's Farmhouse when its flint walls were first laid.
Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework offers a route to exceptional new architecture in the open countryside, and the downs above East Garston are exactly the kind of landscape where this policy applies. The North Wessex Downs National Landscape designation means any new dwelling outside the settlement boundary must demonstrate truly outstanding design — a building that enhances its setting and is sensitive to the defining characteristics of the area. We have navigated this process for clients elsewhere and understand what it takes to satisfy both the design quality threshold and the landscape officers' concerns. Sustainable Design runs through every project we undertake, whether it is a Paragraph 84 dwelling on the downs or a modest extension to an existing home. PassivHaus Design sets our benchmark for new-build energy performance, delivering homes that need almost no conventional heating. New Build Design within the village itself requires careful attention to the established material palette — flint, brick, tile — and the scale of what already exists. Extension Design for homes in East Garston follows the same principle: the new work should read as a natural continuation of the building, not an addition that ignores its context.
East Garston is a village shaped by its geology — the chalk that made the gallops, the flint that built the walls, the river that drew people here in the first place. If you are considering a project in this part of the Lambourn Valley, whether renovating, extending, retrofitting, or building something new within the North Wessex Downs, we would welcome the chance to talk about what considered architecture can do for your home.