Not many villages in England were designed. Most grew by accretion — a farmstead here, a cottage there, the church anchoring whatever followed. Erlestoke is different. In the 1780s, Joshua Smith set about remaking this place as a single composition: the houses relocated to the High Street, a new mansion rising on the hill to the east, and William Emes shaping the parkland that now wraps around the village on three sides. What fascinates me is what Smith did with the fragments. When the old Elizabethan manor house came down, its carved stonework and architectural sculpture were not discarded but built into the new estate cottages along the High Street — pieces of one century's ambition set into the walls of the next. Tilted Lodge, dating from around 1800, is the most visible example, but walk the length of the street and you find these moments everywhere, the old house living on in the fabric of the village it was demolished to create. That kind of continuity — not preservation for its own sake, but material given a second life in a new context — is something we think about constantly in our work.
Award-winning Architects in Erlestoke
Why Clients in Erlestoke Trust Gresford Architects
Gresford Architects was founded in London in 2006, and we now work from Oxford with clients across the country. Our work on The Deerings, a certified Passivhaus home in Hertfordshire, won the RIBA East Award in 2018, and our renovation of The Old Water Tower was shortlisted for the RIBA South Awards in 2016 — two projects that reflect the range of what we do, from new builds designed to the most demanding energy standards to the careful transformation of existing structures. I trained at the Mackintosh School of Architecture in Glasgow, and I am a RIBA Chartered and ARB Registered Architect, a member of the Passivhaus Trust, and accredited by The Green Register. My membership of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings shapes how we approach historic fabric — with patience, respect and an understanding that the best interventions often involve doing less, not more. Our projects have featured in Dezeen, Grand Designs Magazine and The Modern House Journal, and in 2025 I was invited to judge the British Homes Awards.
How We Work with Homes in Erlestoke
Renovations in Erlestoke demand an understanding of why this village looks the way it does. The conservation area, designated in 1985, protects a streetscape that is essentially one landowner's vision — estate cottages built to a coherent plan, many of them incorporating salvaged stonework and carved fragments from the earlier manor house. That layering of periods within a single building is what makes these homes architecturally rich, but it also means that every renovation must read the full history of the structure before proposing any change. Wiltshire Council handles planning and listed building consent for the village, and with a significant concentration of listed buildings across the parish, the majority of projects here will involve some level of heritage consideration. We approach that not as a constraint but as a discipline that sharpens the design — every decision about a new opening, a rerouted service run or an upgraded floor must be justified against the fabric it touches.
Extension Design in a conservation area village like Erlestoke is a question of proportion, material and restraint. The estate cottages along the High Street have a strong visual rhythm — consistent rooflines, stone walls, a sense of belonging to one another — and any addition must work within that rhythm without simply copying it. The best extensions are those that are clearly contemporary yet unmistakably part of the same conversation as the original building. In Erlestoke, where the Elizabethan Cottage survives as a rare timber-framed, herringbone-brick and thatch building from the sixteenth or seventeenth century alongside the later stone estate cottages, the village already demonstrates that different periods and materials can sit together when the relationship is handled well. We bring the same thinking to every extension we design — new work that respects the existing without pretending to be part of it.
The estate cottages in Erlestoke, built in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, predate any consideration of thermal performance. Their solid stone walls, while beautiful in the street elevation, lose heat steadily — through mortar joints in the rubble stonework, through uninsulated roof slopes and through single-glazed windows that face the High Street. EnerPHit, the certified retrofit standard from the Passivhaus Institute, provides a rigorous, whole-building approach to transforming that performance. The fabric-first strategy works from the inside out: carefully detailed internal insulation that respects the moisture behaviour of stone and rubble walls, improved airtightness at every junction, and mechanical ventilation with heat recovery to maintain air quality without opening windows that face onto a listed streetscape. For homes in Erlestoke where the external appearance is protected by the conservation area designation, EnerPHit is particularly valuable — the transformation is entirely internal, invisible from the street, yet the difference in comfort, running costs and carbon performance is profound.
Sustainable Design is the principle that connects all of our services, from the most delicate renovation to an ambitious new build. We design homes that are comfortable, designed to last, and built to use energy and materials as efficiently as possible. For clients considering a new home in the countryside around Erlestoke, where the northern edge of Salisbury Plain meets the parkland and agricultural land surrounding the village, New Build Design and PassivHaus Design offer the opportunity to build to near-zero energy demand from the outset — not through technology bolted on after the fact, but through the performance of the building fabric itself. And for truly exceptional sites in the open landscape beyond the settlement boundary, Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework sets the bar: a new dwelling must be truly outstanding in design, raise standards of architecture, and significantly enhance its immediate setting.
If you are considering a project in Erlestoke — whether renovating one of the village's estate cottages, extending a home within the conservation area, or improving the thermal performance of a building that deserves to work as well as it looks — we would welcome the conversation.