Some buildings ask you to slow down and look more carefully. The round tower of St Mary's Church in Great Shefford is one of them — twelfth-century at its base, with a fifteenth-century octagonal top storey that catches the light differently as you walk around it. It is one of only two round-towered churches in Berkshire, a form far more common in East Anglia, and its presence here in the Lambourn Valley feels like a quiet insistence on individuality. The village sits where the chalk downland meets the River Lambourn, one of England's clearest chalk streams, and that meeting of geology and water has shaped everything from the flint in the older walls to the way the settlement follows the valley floor. As an architect, what strikes me about Great Shefford is how the buildings belong to their ground — the flint, the brick, the low rooflines that do not compete with the sweep of the Downs above. Working here means responding to a landscape that already has something very particular to say.
Award-winning Architects in Great Shefford
Sustainable Architecture Rooted in Experience
A village like Great Shefford — where flint walls sit alongside chalk streams and the Downs rise just beyond the rooftops — asks a particular kind of attention from an architect. It is the kind of place we set up Gresford Architects to work in. I founded the practice in London in 2006, and we are now based in Oxford, working with clients across the country on homes that are comfortable, designed to last and built to use energy and materials as efficiently as possible. Our Passivhaus home The Deerings in Hertfordshire won a RIBA East Award in 2018, and our work has been published in Dezeen, The Modern House Journal and Grand Designs Magazine. I am a RIBA chartered and ARB registered architect, accredited by The Green Register and a member of the Passivhaus Trust. What matters most in a setting like the Lambourn Valley is the ability to listen to a landscape before proposing anything new — a sensibility shaped by my membership of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings and by my wife Phoebe's work as a conservation architect. In 2025 I was invited to judge the British Homes Awards, and in 2018 I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the Building Design Awards — recognition that sustainability and design quality are not competing ambitions but the same one.
Working Within the Downs and the Lambourn Valley
Great Shefford lies within the North Wessex Downs National Landscape, and West Berkshire Council rightly applies careful scrutiny to development in this protected setting. The chalk grassland above the village, the Lambourn water meadows, the open farmland that has defined the parish for centuries — these are not a backdrop to architecture but its context, and any building that ignores them will always feel like an intrusion. Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework recognises that exceptional homes can be built in rural landscapes where standard development would not be permitted, but only where the architecture genuinely responds to the character of the place. In the Lambourn Valley, that means understanding the scale of the downland, the way light moves across the chalk, and the quiet palette of flint and brick that has always belonged here. New Build Design in this setting is not about making a statement — it is about making something that could only exist on this particular piece of ground.
Renovations to the older buildings in Great Shefford call for an understanding of traditional construction that goes beyond aesthetics. The village's listed buildings — including the Grade II* St Mary's with its remarkable round tower, the older houses around the church in their flint and brick, and the Grade II listed Swan Inn — are built from materials drawn directly from the surrounding landscape. Flint behaves differently from stone or brick; it moves moisture in its own way, and interventions that ignore this can cause more harm than good. Our membership of SPAB informs every renovation we undertake, and my wife Phoebe's work as a conservation architect has deepened that understanding further. We approach each project with the conviction that the best renovations reveal what was always good about a building, rather than imposing something new over it. EnerPHit, the certified retrofit standard, offers a way to bring older homes up to modern thermal performance without sacrificing the character that makes them worth keeping — careful insulation, improved airtightness and mechanical ventilation designed around the building as it actually is, not as a generic template.
The housing stock in Great Shefford is not all flint and thatch — there are homes from the mid-twentieth century onwards that were built to different standards and for different expectations of comfort. Extension Design for these properties is an opportunity to rethink the relationship between the house and its valley setting, opening rooms towards the Downs or the water meadows, bringing natural light into spaces that were designed for a different era. Sustainable Design runs through every extension we design, from material choices and orientation to long-term energy strategy. For homeowners in Great Shefford who want to go further, PassivHaus Design delivers homes that maintain stable internal temperatures year-round with almost no conventional heating — a standard that makes particular sense in a landscape where building sensitively means building efficiently, reducing the footprint of every home on the Downs that surround it.
Great Shefford is a village shaped by its valley and its downland, a place where the buildings have always taken their cue from the ground beneath them. If you are considering a project here — whether that is a sensitive renovation, an extension that transforms how your home functions, or a new home in this remarkable landscape — we would welcome the chance to talk it through.