There is a Norman motte on the spur above Hampstead Norreys, a scheduled monument about four metres high and twenty-five metres across, and it is made of chalk — carved straight from the ground it stands on. That detail has stayed with me since I first walked through the village. The Normans did not bring their building material here; they used what was already beneath their feet. And when you look at the rest of Hampstead Norreys, you see the same instinct running through nine centuries of building: flint knapped from the chalk in the walls of St Mary's Church, Bath stone dressings cut to catch the light, timber-framed barns at Oakhouse Farm still standing under thatch, brick at Wyld Court warming the village's edges. This is a place where architecture grows from the landscape. At Gresford Architects, that is exactly the kind of relationship between building and ground that drives our work.
Award-winning Architects in Hampstead Norreys
Why We're Right for Hampstead Norreys
I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006, and we are now based in Oxford, working with clients across the country. A conservation village like Hampstead Norreys, sitting within the North Wessex Downs National Landscape and under the planning authority of West Berkshire District Council, demands a particular fluency — the ability to read a place's material character, understand what the planning framework protects, and design within those constraints without surrendering ambition. My membership of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings shapes how I approach older structures, and my training at the Mackintosh School of Architecture in Glasgow taught me to think through materials before form. Our project The Deerings, a Passivhaus home in Hertfordshire, won the RIBA East Award in 2018, and I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the Building Design Awards that same year. I was invited to judge the British Homes Awards in 2025. We are members of the Passivhaus Trust and accredited by The Green Register — credentials that matter in a village where every intervention is visible and every material choice has to earn its place.
Architecture Shaped by the Pang Valley
Renovations in Hampstead Norreys often begin with buildings that have already been adapted many times. The Manor House dates from the seventeenth century, and its surrounding barns and outbuildings tell a story of continuous use — structures built for agriculture, repurposed as homes, their timber frames and flint plinths still doing the work they were made for. We approach every renovation by understanding what the building already knows: its orientation, its structural logic, the way its materials weather and breathe. St Mary's Church embodies this layering — twelfth-century origins, a thirteenth-century rebuild, a fifteenth-century tower, a nave roof dated 1635, and Arthur Baker's sensitive internal restoration in 1880. Each generation read what was there and responded. That is how we work.
EnerPHit brings this philosophy into the realm of thermal performance. Older homes in Hampstead Norreys — solid-walled cottages with flint and brick, timber-framed farmhouses — were built for a different climate and a different fuel economy. EnerPHit treats the whole building as a system, improving insulation, airtightness, and ventilation to bring comfort and efficiency close to Passivhaus standards without stripping away the character that makes these buildings worth keeping. For a village where the conservation area protects the streetscape and the National Landscape protects the setting, that balance between performance and appearance is not optional — it is the whole challenge.
Extension Design in a conservation village requires the same material sensitivity. The best extensions in places like Hampstead Norreys do not compete with the existing building — they complete it. Whether the house is a flint cottage along the village street or a brick and tile property on its edges, the extension should feel as though the building always intended to grow this way. Sustainable Design underpins everything we do: careful orientation, natural ventilation, materials chosen for longevity and low environmental impact — the same principles that kept the barns at Oakhouse Farm standing for centuries.
PassivHaus Design sets the most rigorous standard for new construction, and New Build Design in Hampstead Norreys, where opportunities are rare and scrutiny is high, benefits enormously from that discipline. A new home here needs to sit within the village's grain — the modest scale, the material palette of flint, brick, and tile — while performing to the highest contemporary standards of energy efficiency. For sites in the wider landscape of the North Wessex Downs, Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework offers a route to exceptional rural homes — homes that earn their planning consent through the quality of their architecture and their response to the land.
Hampstead Norreys has been building from its own ground for a thousand years — chalk into motte, flint into church, timber into barn. If you are planning a project here, we would welcome the chance to continue that conversation between building and place.