What strikes me about East Ilsley is the tension between movement and stillness. For centuries this was a place shaped by passage — drovers bringing flocks down from the Berkshire Downs, the sheep fair that drew up to eighty thousand animals in a single day, racehorses trained on the surrounding gallops as an offshoot from Lambourn. Broad Street is wide enough to tell you its original purpose without a word of explanation. And yet the buildings that line it are anything but transient. East Ilsley Hall, with its grey brick dressed in red and a tiled mansard roof, has stood on the street since the early eighteenth century — a composed, quietly confident piece of Georgian architecture. The Church of St Mary, Grade I listed and dating from the thirteenth century, is built of flint with Bath stone dressings, its embattled tower and crown post roof speaking to a still earlier permanence. The architecture was always the anchor here, the still point around which everything else moved, and that rootedness shapes how I think about designing for this place.
Award-winning Architects in East Ilsley
An Architect's Practice Built for Places Like East Ilsley
I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006, and we are now based in Oxford. The kind of place East Ilsley is — a Downland village with a conservation area, a Grade I listed church, a Grade II* hall, set within the North Wessex Downs — is exactly where careful architecture makes the greatest difference. We won the RIBA East Award in 2018 for The Deerings in Hertfordshire, a Passivhaus home that proved energy performance and design ambition are not competing priorities. That same year I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the Building Design Awards, and in 2025 I judged the British Homes Awards. Our work has been featured in Dezeen, Grand Designs Magazine, and the RIBA Journal. I am a Chartered Architect and a member of RIBA, the Passivhaus Trust, and the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings — an affiliation that matters in a village where so much of the built fabric deserves the same respect as the landscape around it.
Architectural Services for a Downland Village with Deep Roots
Renovations in East Ilsley demand an understanding of how different materials age and how different centuries of construction respond to intervention. The flint walls of St Mary's behave quite differently from the fine Georgian brickwork of East Ilsley Hall, and both are worlds apart from the rendered cottages and later infill that fill out the village between them. Working within the conservation area, and under the eye of West Berkshire Council as the local planning authority, means every renovation needs to demonstrate that it respects the character of the street and the materials that define it. We approach this work by reading the building first — understanding its structural logic, its moisture behaviour, its relationship to the buildings beside it — before proposing anything that changes it. Lime mortars, breathable insulation, sympathetic joinery: these are not afterthoughts but the foundation of a renovation that improves a home without diminishing what made it worth keeping.
EnerPHit is the natural companion to renovation in a village like this. Many of the older homes in East Ilsley — the Georgian houses along Broad Street with their sash windows and solid brick walls, the rendered cottages with single-skin construction — lose heat at a rate their builders never anticipated. EnerPHit allows us to dramatically improve thermal performance through targeted measures: insulation chosen to suit the wall construction, upgraded airtightness, mechanical ventilation with heat recovery, and high-performance glazing that respects the proportions of the original openings. The result is a home that is warmer, quieter, and far less expensive to run — without the flint being clad or the brickwork hidden. It is retrofit as preservation, not erasure.
Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework offers a route to exceptional new homes in rural settings, and the North Wessex Downs surrounding East Ilsley are precisely the kind of landscape where this policy finds its purpose. The test is demanding — the architecture must be of outstanding quality and enhance its immediate setting — but for the right site on the chalk downland above the village, it is a genuine opportunity. We approach Paragraph 84 projects with the same attention to landscape, materials, and environmental performance that runs through all our work, designing homes that belong to their setting rather than occupying it.
Sustainable Design is the thread that connects every service we offer. In East Ilsley, where the chalk grassland of the North Wessex Downs meets a built environment spanning seven centuries, sustainability is the practical business of ensuring that what we build or alter today works for the next generation as well as this one. We design homes that are comfortable, economical to run, and built to last, using materials chosen for their longevity and environmental impact.
Extension Design for homes in East Ilsley needs to respond to the conservation area's character. An extension to a Georgian house on Broad Street calls for a different approach than extending a mid-twentieth-century property on the village's edges, but in both cases the aim is the same: more space, more light, and a stronger connection to the Downland landscape. PassivHaus Design sets the benchmark for new construction, delivering outstanding airtightness, minimal energy demand, and indoor comfort that conventional building cannot match. New Build Design within or near the village requires sensitivity to the materials palette — flint, brick, tile — and to the settlement pattern the conservation area protects.
East Ilsley has been shaped by movement and trade, but the buildings that endure here were made to stay. If you are considering a project in this part of the Downs — whether renovating a Georgian house on Broad Street, improving a cottage's energy performance, or exploring a new home in the surrounding landscape — we would welcome the conversation.