Not many places in southern England can claim an 800-year-old forest as their nearest neighbour. Burnham Beeches — ancient pollarded woodland, owned and managed by the City of London Corporation since 1880, designated a Special Area of Conservation — sits right against the western edge of Farnham Common and shapes almost everything about how the built environment here works. It is not simply scenery. The SAC designation means no net new dwellings can be built within 500 metres of the woodland boundary, and any residential development within 5.6 kilometres must contribute to a mitigation strategy protecting the habitat. For an architect, that is a fascinating condition: a living ecological system acting as the primary planning constraint, asking every project to justify its footprint before a single drawing is made. It is exactly the kind of challenge I find most rewarding — where sustainability is not an abstract ambition but the starting point for design.
Award-winning Architects in Farnham Common/Farnham Royal
An Architect's Practice Built on Sustainability and Heritage
I am a member of the Passivhaus Trust and accredited with The Green Register — two commitments that reflect how central energy performance and environmental responsibility are to the way we design. I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006, and we now work with clients across the country from our Oxford studio. I am ARB registered and RIBA Chartered, and a member of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, which matters in a parish where the Church of St Mary retains its twelfth-century chancel and Yew Place has roots reaching back to the sixteenth century. Our work on The Great Barn in Buckinghamshire — a Grade II listed barn restoration — showed what careful, informed stewardship of historic fabric looks like in practice. The Deerings, a Passivhaus home in Hertfordshire, won the RIBA East Award in 2018 and demonstrated that a house can achieve exceptional thermal performance without sacrificing architectural ambition. I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the Building Design Awards in 2018, and a judge for the British Homes Awards in 2025. Our projects have been featured in Dezeen, The Modern House Journal, and Grand Designs Magazine.
Designing for Life Beside Burnham Beeches
Extension Design is the service most homeowners in Farnham Common and Farnham Royal ask about first. The Farnham Royal Conservation Area protects the historic core of the village, where listed buildings including the Grade II listed Crown public house and The Stray — an Arts and Crafts house built in 1914 by Henry Thomas Hare — sit alongside later development from every decade of the twentieth century. The housing stock beyond the conservation area is varied — Victorian and Edwardian properties in the older parts, interwar and mid-century houses along the roads connecting the two villages, and later twentieth-century development filling the gaps. Many were built on generous plots with mature trees and hedgerows that echo the wooded character of the wider parish, and an extension can unlock space that the original layout never imagined without damaging that green setting. We look for the moves that connect a house more fully to its garden, that bring light deeper into the plan, and that make a home more comfortable, more economical to run, and more joyful to live in than any off-the-shelf addition could achieve.
Renovations are essential in the conservation area, where altering a building means understanding what makes it significant before proposing what comes next. My wife Phoebe is a conservation architect, and her discipline — reading historic fabric layer by layer, understanding why a building was made the way it was — informs every renovation we take on. In Farnham Royal, where buildings range from medieval origins at Yew Place to Nesfield's Victorian rebuilding of St Mary's Church, that depth of reading is not optional. It is the foundation of any good intervention.
EnerPHit is the retrofit approach we use when homeowners in Farnham Common or Farnham Royal want to transform the energy performance of an existing home without demolishing and starting again. Many houses here — particularly the solid-walled interwar and post-war stock — are draughty, difficult to heat, and expensive to run. EnerPHit addresses this through meticulous insulation, improved airtightness, and mechanical ventilation with heat recovery. The result is a home that holds its warmth, manages its moisture, and costs a fraction of what it once did to keep comfortable through winter. In the conservation area, where external appearance matters, the transformation happens behind the existing facade — invisible from the street, unmistakable from inside.
Sustainable Design connects everything we do, and beside Burnham Beeches it takes on particular resonance. The SAC mitigation framework already asks developers to think about ecological impact; we extend that thinking to every element of a project — how materials are sourced, how energy demand shrinks, how water is managed, how a structure will age and adapt over decades. A building that uses less energy, lasts longer, and sits lightly on the soil is not only kinder to the ancient woodland beside it but also more comfortable to inhabit and more economical to run. In this setting, that is not ideology. It is the minimum the place requires.
PassivHaus Design represents the highest thermal standard we work to for new construction. A PassivHaus home eliminates draughts, maintains stable temperatures year-round, and uses so little energy for heating that a conventional boiler becomes unnecessary. For any new build within the parish — whether replacing an existing dwelling or developing a site that clears the Burnham Beeches SAC buffer — PassivHaus offers a way to build that genuinely respects the ancient woodland beside you.
New Build Design in Farnham Common and Farnham Royal operates within tight constraints. Green Belt wraps around the parish, and the Burnham Beeches Special Area of Conservation buffer zone adds another layer of ecological constraint — no net new dwellings within 500 metres of the woodland boundary, and any residential development within 5.6 kilometres must contribute to habitat mitigation. The conservation area further restricts what is possible. But constraint breeds clarity: when the planning framework is this specific, the design response must be equally precise. We approach new builds here with the care that the setting demands — each home considered in terms of its orientation, its materials, its relationship to the landscape and the woodland beyond.
Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework offers a route to exceptional homes in the countryside surrounding the parish. The Green Belt land between Farnham Common and Beaconsfield, the rolling ground toward Stoke Poges, the woodlands that echo the protected character of Burnham Beeches — these are landscapes that demand architecture of genuinely outstanding quality. For the right site and the right client, Paragraph 84 is an invitation to create something that enhances those contours and that depth of ancient green rather than diminishing it.
Whether you are extending a family home, renovating a listed building in the conservation area, improving the thermal performance of an older house, or exploring what might be possible on a countryside site, we would welcome the conversation. Living beside ancient woodland comes with responsibility — and the architecture that grows from that responsibility tends to be the most rewarding kind.