Firsdown sits on chalk downland northeast of Salisbury, and what strikes me about it is the gap between the age of the land and the age of the buildings. The earthworks of Figsbury Ring — a Scheduled Monument managed by the National Trust, enclosing some 6.4 hectares of grassland on the ridge above the village — have been here since at least the third millennium BC, shaped and reshaped through the Neolithic, Bronze Age and Iron Age. Yet the village itself is one of the youngest in Wiltshire. The first houses along Firs Road appeared between the wars, simple bungalows on generous plots, and by 1940 there were barely a dozen. It was only in 1986 that Firsdown became a civil parish in its own right. The buildings here are modest, practical, and built without much thought for the landscape they sit within — and that, as an architect, is precisely what makes them interesting. These are homes with room to grow, room to improve, and room to be brought into a better relationship with the chalk downland that surrounds them.
Award-winning Architects in Firsdown
Why Homeowners in Firsdown Trust Gresford Architects
Gresford Architects is a RIBA Chartered and ARB Registered practice, founded in London in 2006 and now based in Oxford, working with clients across the country. I trained at the Mackintosh School of Architecture in Glasgow, where I developed what I can only describe as an enthusiasm for exploring surfaces, joints, textures and light — an instinct that serves us well whether the project is a certified Passivhaus new build or the careful extension of a mid-century bungalow. The Deerings, our Passivhaus home in Hertfordshire, won the RIBA East Award in 2018, and that same year I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the Building Design Awards. Our work has been published in Dezeen, Grand Designs Magazine and The Modern House Journal, and in 2025 I was invited to judge the British Homes Awards. We believe that every home — whether it was built last year or seventy years ago — deserves to be comfortable, designed to last, and built to use energy and materials as efficiently as possible.
Architectural Services for Homes in Firsdown
Sustainable Design is the thread that connects everything we do, and for homes in Firsdown it is especially relevant. Much of the village's housing stock was built between the 1950s and the 1970s — the generation of bungalows and chalet-style homes that spread along Firs Road after the war. Solidly built but designed before thermal performance, airtightness or energy efficiency were priorities, they work well enough but could work so much better. Sustainability for us is not an add-on; it is the lens through which we think about materials, energy, comfort and longevity. The generous plots that give Firsdown its open, spacious character also allow for insulation improvements, external works and extensions that would be impossible in a tighter village setting.
Extension Design is where much of the opportunity lies in a village like Firsdown. The generous plots that characterise Firs Road and the surrounding streets give homeowners in Firsdown something that many villages cannot offer: space. A well-designed extension can transform how a household uses its home — connecting living spaces to the garden, bringing in natural light, or adding the rooms a growing family needs — and the open setting here allows designs that respond to the chalk downland landscape rather than being hemmed in by tight boundaries or conservation area restrictions. Wiltshire Council handles planning applications for the village, and the absence of a conservation area designation means that proposals are assessed on their design quality and their relationship to the existing streetscape rather than against a heritage framework.
For those considering starting from scratch, New Build Design on the chalk downland around Firsdown offers the chance to create a home that is responsive to this landscape from the ground up. A new home here can be oriented to capture the long views south towards Figsbury Ring or north across the open downland, designed to PassivHaus Design standards for exceptional thermal comfort and minimal energy use. The chalk landscape has shaped building here for millennia — flint where it surfaces, timber frames, lime render — and a new home can honour that tradition while achieving the highest modern performance standards. The Deerings, our RIBA award-winning Passivhaus home, demonstrates what is possible when performance and design ambition work as one.
EnerPHit, the Passivhaus Institute's retrofit standard, was designed for exactly the kind of homes that line Firs Road: solid-wall bungalows from the 1950s and 1960s, their single glazing and minimal insulation letting heat disappear into the chalk downland air. What EnerPHit offers is not demolition but transformation — careful insulation, whether internal or external, improved airtightness, and mechanical ventilation with heat recovery that can be tucked quietly into the existing fabric. The result is remarkable: a home that is quieter, warmer in winter, cooler in summer, and dramatically cheaper to heat. And because the plots in Firsdown are generous, the envelope improvements can be combined with an extension that adds the rooms a family needs while keeping the original roofline and street presence intact.
Renovations bring new life to homes that are sound in structure but tired in use. In Firsdown, the post-war bungalows along Firs Road have often been lived in for thirty, forty or fifty years with only cosmetic updates. A thoughtful renovation can open up the floor plan, improve natural light, and introduce material quality that makes daily living better — timber, plaster, brick and stone treated honestly rather than hidden. For exceptional rural sites on the chalk downland surrounding the village, Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework provides a route to a new dwelling — provided the design is truly outstanding and sits naturally within the Wiltshire landscape.
If you are considering a project in Firsdown — whether extending a home to make the most of its generous plot, upgrading a post-war bungalow to modern comfort standards, or building something new on the chalk downland — we would welcome the conversation.