What strikes me about Easterton is the way the village tells its own material story, generation by generation. The earliest surviving buildings here are timber-framed farmhouses — The Royal Oak, with its seventeenth-century thatched structure, and Willoughby's, an early seventeenth-century farmhouse where the original frame still shapes the building's character. Then, from the eighteenth century, local brick takes over. Kestrels, a Grade II* listed house on Oak Lane built in the 1730s from red brick sourced from local clay pits in nearby Market Lavington, marks the moment this village found a new material language — one that would define its streetscape for the next two hundred years. Walk along the village street, with the brook running along its western edge and gardens climbing steeply up the terraced eastern slope, and you can read that transition in the fabric of every other building. It is exactly the kind of place where an architect needs to listen before drawing a single line.
Award-winning Architects in Easterton
An Award-Winning Practice Working Across Wiltshire
I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006 and trained at the Mackintosh School of Architecture in Glasgow, where I developed a lasting respect for the relationship between materials, craft and place. That principle runs through every project we take on, whether it is a Passivhaus new build or the careful renovation of a listed farmhouse. We are RIBA Chartered and ARB Registered, accredited by The Green Register, and members of both the Passivhaus Trust and the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. Our work has been recognised with a RIBA East Award for The Deerings, a Passivhaus home in Hertfordshire, and a RIBA South Awards shortlist for The Old Water Tower. I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the 2018 Building Design Awards, and in 2025 I served as a judge for the British Homes Awards. We work with clients across the country, and our projects have been featured in Dezeen, Grand Designs Magazine, The Modern House Journal and the RIBA Journal.
Designing for Easterton's Built Character
Renovations in Easterton demand an architect who can read the layered history held within these walls. A building like Kestrels reveals multiple phases of construction — its 1730s red brickwork laid in an L-shaped plan, with archaeological finds on the site suggesting occupation stretching back to Roman times. The Royal Oak carries parts that may date as far back as the fourteenth century beneath its later seventeenth-century thatch. Renovating buildings of this kind means understanding how timber frames move and settle, how early brickwork from local clay performs differently from modern engineering brick, and where lime mortar and breathable finishes are essential to the building's long-term health. My membership of SPAB shapes this approach — old buildings are understood first and respected throughout, with each intervention informed by the logic of the original construction.
Extension Design in Easterton is shaped by both the conservation area, designated in 1985, and the village's distinctive topography. On the eastern side of the village street, gardens rise steeply in terraced banks — any extension here must work with the slope, not against it, responding to the levels and sight lines that the terrain creates. On the western side, the brook and its corridor set their own constraints on footprint and drainage. Wiltshire Council, as the local planning authority, will assess proposals within the conservation area for their impact on the character and appearance of the village, and we prepare applications that anticipate these considerations from the earliest design sketches. The materials palette matters too — an extension to a red brick cottage here needs to respect the warm tones of the local clay tradition rather than introducing something alien to the street.
EnerPHit is particularly relevant for the older solid-walled buildings in Easterton. Many of the two-storey red brick houses with their slate or clay tile roofs are beautiful but thermally inefficient, and a certified EnerPHit retrofit can transform their comfort and running costs without compromising the character that makes them worth preserving. The approach is forensic — understanding where heat is lost, how moisture moves through solid brick and lime mortar, and where insulation can be introduced internally or externally without causing condensation or trapping dampness. For a village with buildings spanning four centuries of construction, each retrofit is a conversation between modern performance standards and the building's own logic.
Sustainable Design underpins every project we undertake at Gresford Architects. In a conservation village like Easterton, sustainability is not a bolt-on — it is woven into the choices we make about materials, orientation, natural light and ventilation, creating homes that are more comfortable to inhabit, more economical to run and more joyful to live in. PassivHaus Design takes these principles to the highest certified standard, delivering exceptional airtightness and minimal energy demand for new homes. New Build Design offers the freedom to achieve these performance targets from the ground up, and any new development in Easterton would need to respond sensitively to both the conservation area and the village's established scale. For sites in the open countryside around Salisbury Plain's northern edge, Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework provides a route for a dwelling of truly exceptional architectural quality — justified not by housing allocation but by the standard of its design and its response to this landscape.
If you are considering a project in Easterton — whether renovating a timber-framed farmhouse, extending a brick cottage on the terraced slope, or improving the thermal performance of a solid-walled home — we would welcome the conversation.