There is something remarkable about a place that has reinvented itself as completely as Greenham has. Where cruise missiles once sat behind razor wire, heathland now stretches across five hundred hectares of restored common — nightjars nesting where concrete hardstandings used to be. The village itself carries the same story of transformation in its housing stock: homes built to house service personnel and their families at the adjacent airbase, designed for purpose rather than permanence, now lived in by people who have chosen to stay. What draws me to Greenham as an architect is that tension between what was built quickly and what endures. The buildings that remain from the airbase era were never meant to last generations, and the question facing homeowners in Greenham now is how to take those structures and make them genuinely comfortable, energy-efficient and worth keeping for decades to come.
Award-winning Architects in Greenham
Why Trust Gresford Architects with Your Greenham Project
Gresford Architects has been working with clients across the country since I founded the practice in London in 2006. We are now based in Oxford, and we are RIBA chartered, ARB registered, and members of the Passivhaus Trust, The Green Register and the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. Our work has been featured in Dezeen, Grand Designs Magazine and The Modern House Journal. The Deerings, our Passivhaus project in Hertfordshire, won a RIBA East Award in 2018 — the same year I was shortlisted as Sustainability Architect of the Year at the Building Design Awards. In 2025 I was invited to judge the British Homes Awards. What this means for a project in Greenham is that we bring tested expertise in exactly the areas this parish demands: deep retrofit of underperforming housing, sensitive work alongside listed and historic structures, and the ability to design new homes that sit thoughtfully within a landscape that has already been through more change than most.
Architectural Services for Homes in Greenham
The 1960s housing that forms the core of Greenham was built to standard military specifications — flat roofs or shallow pitches, minimal insulation, single-glazed windows, layouts designed for short postings rather than long lives. For homes built half a century ago with no thought for thermal performance, the answer lies in deep retrofit. EnerPHit, the Passivhaus Institute's certified retrofit standard, provides the framework: continuous insulation that eliminates cold bridges, high-performance windows and doors, airtightness detailing, and mechanical ventilation with heat recovery. We applied these principles to The Old Orchard in Oxfordshire, and what changed was immediate — warmer rooms, lower running costs, genuinely fresh air without opening a window. For the servicemen's houses in Greenham, this is transformative not as replacement but as intelligent improvement that keeps the building and remakes how it feels to live in it.
Greenham also has fabric that predates the airbase by centuries, and it requires a different kind of attention. The Grade II listed Church of St Mary, built between 1875 and 1895 by Henry Woodyer in flint and stone, stands as one of the parish's older landmarks. Greenham Lodge, designed by Norman Shaw in 1879 in red brick with stone dressings, is another — a Grade II* listed building whose craftsmanship speaks to the care that Victorian architects brought to country houses. Pigeon's Farm preserves even older agricultural buildings. Working with historic structures like these demands respect for what already exists, and as a member of SPAB I bring that discipline to every Renovations project. Planning applications in Greenham are determined by West Berkshire Council, and understanding the constraints that apply to listed buildings and their settings is fundamental to getting proposals through the planning process without losing what makes the building worth preserving.
Extension Design is increasingly relevant in Greenham as families outgrow homes that were designed for a different way of living. A well-designed extension does not simply add floor area — it reimagines how the whole house works, how light moves through it, how inside connects to outside. Sustainable Design runs through every project we take on, whether that is an extension, a renovation or a full new build, because sustainability is not a separate service but a discipline that shapes every decision from material selection to orientation to long-term running costs.
For those with land on the rural edges of the parish, close to the restored heathland of Greenham and Crookham Commons, New Build Design and PassivHaus Design offer the chance to create something exceptional from the ground up — a home built to Passivhaus standards that delivers outstanding comfort, superb air quality and energy costs that fundamentally change the economics of daily life. Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework provides a route to building in the open countryside where the design quality must be high enough to genuinely enhance its setting, and the landscape around Greenham — heathland, farmland, the gentle fall toward the Kennet Valley — rewards architecture that responds to what is already there rather than ignoring it.
Whether you are retrofitting a home built for the airbase era, restoring something far older, or building new on the edges of Greenham, we would welcome the chance to talk about what your project could become.