What interests me about Great Somerford is how openly its buildings tell the story of change. The Mount House began life in the sixteenth century as a timber-framed manor — an L-shaped hall range with a two-storeyed east porch — and over the centuries it was given a new staircase, heavily moulded panelling, and finally a symmetrical entrance front with a central pediment in the early nineteenth century, the whole thing roughcast to unify what had become a building of many eras. That is not compromise. That is a village where each generation has felt confident enough to reshape what it inherited rather than merely conserve it. The Church of St Peter and St Paul tells a similar story: a twelfth-century foundation rebuilt in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, restored in 1865, and then sensitively re-ordered between 2018 and 2020 to make the interior work for the community it serves today. Great Somerford is a place that understands buildings are not finished objects but living things, and that is an idea I have always believed in.
Award-winning Architects in Great Somerford
Why Homeowners in Great Somerford Trust Gresford Architects
My membership of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings shapes how we approach villages like Great Somerford — places where the character of a building comes from its accumulated layers, and where understanding those layers matters more than imposing a single vision. Gresford Architects is a RIBA Chartered and ARB Registered practice, founded in London in 2006 and now working from Oxford with clients across the country. Our renovation of The Old Water Tower was shortlisted for the RIBA South Awards in 2016, and The Deerings, a certified Passivhaus home in Hertfordshire, won the RIBA East Award in 2018. That same year I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the Building Design Awards, and in 2025 I was invited to judge the British Homes Awards. We are accredited by The Green Register, members of the Passivhaus Trust, and our work has been featured in Dezeen, Grand Designs Magazine and The Modern House Journal. What connects all of this is a belief that architecture should be comfortable, designed to last, and built to use energy and materials as efficiently as possible — whether the project is a new home from the ground up or the careful reworking of a building that has stood for four hundred years.
Architectural Services for Homes in Great Somerford
Renovations in Great Somerford are often a conversation with several centuries at once. The village sits within a conservation area and has 23 listed buildings, many of them rubble stone with stone slate roofs, and the best work here requires an understanding of how these structures have already been altered — what is original, what was added, and where the building's logic still holds. The Mount House is a case in point: beneath the roughcast and the nineteenth-century pediment, the sixteenth-century timber frame survives. Renovating buildings like this means reading the evidence in the fabric, respecting the sequence of changes, and finding ways to improve comfort and performance without erasing the record of what came before. Wiltshire Council manages planning and listed building consent for the village, and their conservation officers expect proposals that demonstrate genuine understanding of the buildings in question.
Extension Design in Great Somerford benefits from the village's distinctive openness. The layout here is not tightly packed terraces but houses interspersed with fields and paddocks, and that generous spacing means extensions have room to breathe — to step into a garden, open onto a view of the River Avon, or create a connection between an older building and the landscape around it. The question is always how the new element relates to what already exists: matching the rubble stone and stone slate of the original, or introducing a material that makes the join legible and honest. Both approaches can work, and the right choice depends on the building, the setting, and the ambitions of the people who live there.
EnerPHit offers a route to transforming the thermal performance of older homes in Great Somerford without altering the external character that the conservation area protects. Many of the village's older buildings have solid rubble stone walls — good at keeping out the weather but poor at retaining heat. The EnerPHit standard, developed by the Passivhaus Institute for retrofit, addresses this through carefully detailed internal insulation, improved airtightness, and mechanical ventilation with heat recovery, all designed to work with the existing structure rather than against it. The result is a home that is warmer, quieter and far less expensive to run, while looking from the outside exactly as it always has.
Sustainable Design is the thread that runs through every project we take on — it is not an add-on but the principle that shapes how we think about materials, energy, comfort and longevity. For homes in Great Somerford, that might mean a renovation that dramatically reduces energy use, an extension built from locally sourced timber, or a New Build Design on the village's edges that meets PassivHaus Design standards from the outset. And for exceptional sites in the open countryside beyond the settlement, Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework offers a route to a new dwelling — provided the design is truly outstanding, raises the standard of architecture, and significantly enhances its immediate setting.
If you are considering a project in Great Somerford — whether renovating a rubble stone cottage, extending a home beside the paddocks, or bringing an older building up to a modern standard of comfort — we would welcome the conversation.