What strikes you first about Flore is the lane pattern. Narrow routes run like fingers from the main street into the centre of the village, and this arrangement — described in the conservation area appraisal as finger-like — is believed to date from the Saxon period. The Domesday Book recorded Flore as Flora in 1086, but the lanes were already old by then. The common fields that the lanes once served were enclosed by Act of Parliament in 1778, the A45 now runs through the village, and the M1 passes close by to the east — yet the Saxon routes still determine how people move through this place and where buildings sit. As an architect, I find this the most telling thing about Flore: the infrastructure outlasted everything built upon it. That tells you something about the power of a good plan.
Award-winning Architects in Flore
Published Work, Practical Range
Our projects have been published in Dezeen, Grand Designs Magazine and The Modern House Journal — work that ranges from a Grade II listed barn restoration in Buckinghamshire to a certified Passivhaus home in Hertfordshire, and shares the conviction that comfort, durability and environmental responsibility are aspects of the same ambition. I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006, and we now work from Oxford with clients across the country. I am an ARB-registered and RIBA Chartered architect, a member of SPAB, the Passivhaus Trust and The Green Register. The Deerings won the RIBA East Award in 2018, the year I was also a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the Building Design Awards. In 2025 I was invited to judge the British Homes Awards. In a village like Flore, where the conservation area protects a high concentration of listed buildings spanning several centuries, that range of experience across heritage and energy is not optional — it is what the work requires.
Architectural Services in a Conservation Village
Renovations in Flore engage with a village whose prosperity from the wool trade in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries produced a remarkable concentration of well-built stone houses. The Church of All Saints, Grade II* listed, dates mainly from the thirteenth century with fourteenth-century additions, a fifteenth-century south porch and east chancel, and Victorian restoration in the 1870s. Flore House, Grade II listed, was built in 1608 for the Enyon family. Along the lanes and the main street, substantial stone and thatch houses from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries — built for the yeoman farmers who prospered from the wool — give the village much of its character. West Northamptonshire Council handles planning for the parish. Through my membership of SPAB, I approach these buildings with the understanding that solid stone walls and thatch roofs have their own behaviours — how they manage moisture, how they breathe — and any renovation must work with those behaviours rather than sealing them off.
Extension Design in Flore's conservation area requires more than a good floor plan. The finger-like lane pattern creates plots of unusual proportions — often narrow and deep — and any extension must work within these inherited shapes rather than fighting them. The stone and thatch palette of the older village sets a clear expectation for materials and scale, though extensions to the later brick-built housing or modern properties offer more design freedom. In every case, the work should make the whole building feel more resolved: responding to the proportions of the existing house, the relationship to the lane, and the character of the neighbouring buildings. Whether the brief is opening up a ground floor, adding a garden room, or creating space above, the design should feel considered and complete.
EnerPHit, the Passivhaus Institute's certified retrofit standard, is well suited to Flore's older housing. The stone and thatch houses from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries present the classic challenge of solid-walled construction: thick walls with no insulation, draughty junctions, and a building envelope designed for ventilation rather than thermal retention. Thatch itself is a good insulator, but the walls and openings are where the heat escapes. Vapour-open insulation, careful airtightness detailing, and mechanical ventilation with heat recovery can transform these homes — warmer, quieter, dramatically cheaper to run — while the stone facades and thatch continue to breathe as they always have.
Sustainable Design connects every project we take on, and in Flore it resonates with a village whose Saxon lane pattern has proved more durable than any individual building upon it. That is the deepest lesson of sustainable design: the plan matters as much as the building. PassivHaus Design sets our benchmark for new construction, delivering certified comfort with minimal energy demand. New Build Design within the conservation area must respect the stone and thatch character that defines the village's identity. For sites in the countryside around the parish, where the pattern of fields created by the 1778 enclosure still defines the landscape, Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework provides a route to architecturally outstanding homes — but the design must be sensitive to a landscape that has been shaped by the village for a very long time.
Flore's lanes have been guiding the architecture here since the Saxon period. If you are considering a project in this village, we would welcome the conversation.