There is something quietly instructive about a village that once made its own bricks. The Pinewood Brickworks at the northern edge of Hermitage opened in the early twentieth century, drawing clay from the ground beneath the parish and firing it into the building blocks that shaped homes, churches, and workplaces across the region — at its peak, fifty thousand bricks a week left the kilns by rail. The works closed in 1967, and today the site is housing, the cycle of extraction turned into a cycle of dwelling. One drying barn from the old brickworks survives, folded into a house, a fragment of industrial memory absorbed into domestic life. I find that story compelling because it captures something essential about the relationship between a place and what gets built on it. Hermitage sits in a shallow valley on the dip slope of the Berkshire Downs, surrounded by woodland and small fields, within the North Wessex Downs National Landscape. The Iron Age hillfort at Grimsbury Castle, a scheduled monument in the parish woods, reminds you that people have been reading this landscape and shaping it for thousands of years. As an architect, what draws me to Hermitage is that tension between the quiet rural setting and the evidence, everywhere, that this ground has always been worked and built upon.
Award-winning Architects in Hermitage
Why Clients Across the Country Trust Gresford Architects
We founded Gresford Architects 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. For a village like Hermitage — where new development sits within a nationally protected landscape and West Berkshire Council applies careful scrutiny to every planning application — you need an architect who understands both the technical demands of sustainable construction and the sensitivity required by the setting. I am a RIBA chartered and ARB registered architect, accredited by The Green Register and a member of the Passivhaus Trust. Our Passivhaus home The Deerings in Hertfordshire won a RIBA East Award in 2018, and I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the Building Design Awards the same year. Our work has been featured in Dezeen, The Modern House Journal and Grand Designs Magazine. In 2025 I was invited to judge the British Homes Awards. My membership of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings and my wife Phoebe's work as a conservation architect inform how we approach even the most contemporary projects — with a respect for context, material honesty, and the long life of buildings.
Designing for Hermitage and the North Wessex Downs
Much of the housing stock in Hermitage dates from the mid-twentieth century onwards, built to the standards and expectations of its time but often falling short of what we now understand about comfort, energy efficiency and the relationship between a home and its surroundings. Extension Design for these properties is an opportunity to rethink that relationship entirely — opening living spaces towards the woodland and downland that define the parish, bringing natural light into rooms that were designed for a different era, and creating homes that feel genuinely connected to the North Wessex Downs landscape rather than simply placed within it. Sustainable Design runs through every extension we create, from the orientation of new glazing and the thermal performance of the envelope to the choice of materials that will age well in this wooded, clay-rich setting. The Hermitage Neighbourhood Plan, adopted in 2024, sets out the village's own vision for how development should respect its character and its position within the National Landscape — and that kind of community-led planning aligns closely with how we work.
For homeowners in Hermitage looking to improve the performance of an existing home without extending, EnerPHit offers a rigorous, certified approach to retrofit. Many of the houses built here in the post-war decades — the kind that once might have been constructed from bricks fired at the Pinewood works themselves — have solid walls, single-glazed windows and heating systems that work far harder than they need to. EnerPHit addresses these issues systematically: careful insulation, improved airtightness, mechanical ventilation with heat recovery, all designed around the building as it actually is rather than as a generic template. The result is a home that is warmer, quieter and dramatically cheaper to run, without altering its external appearance. Renovations to any of the older properties in the parish — and there are characterful houses here that predate the twentieth-century expansion — call for a similar care, understanding how the building was constructed before proposing anything new.
West Berkshire Council's policies for the North Wessex Downs National Landscape mean that any new building in or around Hermitage must demonstrate exceptional sensitivity to the setting. The small-scale housing allocations in the village — sites off Charlotte Close and adjacent to Station Road — reflect a measured approach to growth, and New Build Design in this context demands architecture that sits lightly within the landscape, uses materials and forms that respond to the wooded, undulating character of the parish, and meets the highest environmental standards. PassivHaus Design achieves this by delivering homes that maintain stable internal temperatures year-round with almost no conventional heating, reducing both running costs and environmental impact to a level that makes genuine sense in a protected landscape. For sites in the open countryside beyond the village settlement boundary, Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework provides a route for truly exceptional homes — architecture that is so clearly of its place, so responsive to the Downs and the woodland and the particular quality of this ground, that it justifies development where standard housing would not be permitted.
Hermitage is a village that has always made something of its ground — from Iron Age earthworks to industrial brickmaking to the homes that stand here today. If you are considering a project in Hermitage, whether that is an extension that transforms how your home works, a retrofit that brings real comfort and efficiency, or a new home within this remarkable landscape, we would welcome the conversation.