Walk along Eton High Street and you are reading six centuries of building in a single glance. A fifteenth-century timber frame at numbers 47 to 49 sits beside Georgian red-brick townhouses, their sash windows catching the afternoon light, and beyond the rooftops you can see the pale stone of the College chapel rising above everything else — that vast Perpendicular Gothic nave that Henry VI began in 1440. What strikes me about Eton is the quiet conversation between the monumental and the domestic. The College set the architectural standard — red brick, Bath stone dressings, an ambition to build things that would endure — and over the centuries the town absorbed those lessons into its own more modest fabric. The result is a High Street where every building has something to say about its era, its materials, its relationship to the street and to its neighbours. That kind of layered, evolving character is exactly what draws me to a place as an architect.
Award-winning Architects in Eton
Heritage Expertise Rooted in Real Experience
Working with historic buildings in places like Eton — where six centuries of architecture sit alongside each other on the High Street — requires more than technical competence. It requires a way of seeing, a patience with the past, and a genuine respect for the decisions earlier builders made about materials, proportion and place. My membership of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings reflects that commitment: the belief that you must read a building before you propose to change it. My wife Phoebe is a conservation architect, and that shared understanding of historic fabric runs deep in everything we do at Gresford Architects. We are RIBA chartered and ARB registered, accredited by The Green Register and members of the Passivhaus Trust — not because heritage sensitivity and sustainability are fashionable, but because at their best they are the same discipline approached from different angles. Our Passivhaus home The Deerings won a RIBA East Award in 2018, the same year I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the Building Design Awards. I founded the practice in London in 2006, and we now work with clients across the country from our base in Oxford. In 2025, I was invited to judge the British Homes Awards — a recognition that, in a town like Eton, means something specific: we understand both the buildings that have lasted centuries and the families trying to live comfortably within them.
Architectural Services for Homes in Eton
The entire town of Eton sits within a conservation area, and the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead takes its stewardship of that designation seriously. Renovations here demand an architect who can read the building first — the timber framing behind a rendered facade, the irregularities in a Georgian roofline that tell you the structure has settled and shifted over two hundred years, the way an original staircase relates to the rooms it serves. We approach every renovation as a collaboration with the existing building, working with its character rather than imposing something new upon it. Listed buildings along the High Street and beyond require particular care, and our SPAB training means we understand the philosophy as well as the practicalities: repair rather than replace, use materials that are compatible with the original fabric, and always let the building guide the intervention.
Many of the Georgian and Victorian houses in Eton were built without any thought to thermal performance, and the draughts, cold walls and high energy bills that come with living in a beautiful but uninsulated home are familiar challenges for homeowners in the town. EnerPHit offers a rigorous, Passivhaus-certified approach to retrofitting older buildings — improving airtightness, adding carefully positioned insulation, and introducing mechanical ventilation with heat recovery — while respecting the character and construction methods that make these buildings worth preserving in the first place. The result is a home that stays warm and comfortable throughout the year, energy bills that finally reflect the care taken with the building, and a fabric that will perform well for generations. For homes in Eton's conservation area, this kind of sensitive, high-performance retrofit is often the most impactful thing an architect can do.
Extension Design in a conservation area is a particular discipline. The question is never simply how to add space — it is how to add space in a way that respects the proportions, materials and streetscape that give the town its character. In Eton, where properties often sit in tight plots along the High Street or in the lanes running down towards the Thames, extensions need to be thoughtful about scale, about the relationship between old and new construction, and about the views and sightlines that the planning authority will scrutinise. We bring the same attention to Sustainable Design principles throughout — natural light, cross-ventilation, material efficiency — so that an extension is not only sympathetic to its context but performs to contemporary standards of comfort and energy use.
PassivHaus Design takes that performance ambition to its highest expression in new construction, creating homes where energy efficiency, air quality and thermal comfort are designed in from the very first drawing. For New Build Design on any opportunity sites within or around Eton, the challenge is to create architecture that sits within the established grain of the town — its scale, its materials palette, its relationship between buildings and street — while delivering the kind of environmental performance that the existing housing stock was never designed to achieve. And for those looking beyond the town boundary towards the countryside along the Thames valley, Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework provides a route to building an exceptional home in a rural setting, where the quality of the design itself justifies its place in the landscape.
Whether you are restoring the timber frame of a fifteenth-century building like those on the High Street, bringing warmth and energy efficiency to a Georgian townhouse whose sash windows look down on centuries of change, or extending a family home within the shadow of the College, we would welcome the conversation. Good architecture begins with listening — to you, to the building, and to the place. In Eton, that place has been shaping both for almost six hundred years.