There is a roof in Hullavington that tells you everything you need to know about how buildings once worked. Bradfield Manor Farmhouse, Grade I listed and described by Pevsner as a rare survival of a fifteenth-century hall, still carries the soot-blackened arched braces of an open hall — timbers darkened over centuries by the fire that heated the room below, the smoke rising into the roof void because there was no chimney, no ceiling, just structure and air and warmth. That blackening is not damage. It is evidence. It is the building recording its own use in its own fabric, and it tells an architect more about how people lived with their homes than any drawing or document could. Walk down The Street from the manor and the village unfolds in the same honest tradition: seventeenth-century farmhouses of local stone under stone slate roofs, gabled and solid, built by people who understood their materials because they had no choice but to. The later additions — Darley House and Hullavington House, both built between the 1760s and 1840s — brought a more polished ambition to the village, but the instinct remained the same. Use what the ground gives you. Build to outlast yourself.
Award-winning Architects in Hullavington
An Architect's Practice Built on Heritage and Sustainability
I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006, and we now work from Oxford with clients across the country — including villages in north Wiltshire where the building traditions run deep and the materials have real character. I am a RIBA Chartered and ARB Registered Architect, a member of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, and accredited by The Green Register. That combination matters in a place like Hullavington, where a Grade I listed medieval hall sits alongside seventeenth-century farmsteads, and any work on these buildings requires both an understanding of historic fabric and a commitment to improving how they perform for modern life. Our Passivhaus home The Deerings 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, because the argument we keep making — that sustainability and architectural quality are the same ambition, not competing ones — is central to everything we do. Our work has been published in Dezeen, The Modern House Journal and Grand Designs Magazine, and in 2025 I was invited to judge the British Homes Awards.
Architectural Services for Homes in Hullavington
Renovations in a village like Hullavington are as much about reading a building as they are about redesigning it. The seventeenth-century farmhouses along The Street are typically local stone with stone slate roofs, gabled and thick-walled — buildings that have absorbed centuries of alteration, from inserted chimney stacks to blocked openings to lean-to additions at the rear. Understanding those layers is the starting point. Wiltshire Council handles planning and listed building consent for the village, and where a building is listed, every intervention must demonstrate that it preserves the significance of the original fabric while making the home genuinely better to live in. We take that constraint seriously, not as a restriction but as a framework that concentrates the design on what actually matters: light, comfort, spatial quality, and a building that feels whole rather than patched.
Extension Design for homes in Hullavington requires a careful response to the village's strong material identity. Stone farmhouses with steeply pitched stone slate roofs set a clear visual language — any addition must work within that vocabulary without mimicking it, finding the line between deference and contribution. The best extensions in conservation settings are those that are clearly of their own time yet unmistakably part of the same conversation as the original building. In Hullavington, where the airfield's 1930s buildings used local Bath and Cotswold stone facings to sit within the wider landscape, there is already a precedent for new construction that respects its context through material choice rather than stylistic imitation. We bring the same thinking to domestic extensions, working with the stone palette and proportions that define The Street while introducing contemporary standards of insulation, glazing and internal comfort.
Many of the stone-built homes in Hullavington were constructed long before thermal performance was a consideration — thick walls of local rubble stone that look solid but lose heat steadily through mortar joints, uninsulated roof slopes and draughty window reveals. EnerPHit, the certified retrofit standard developed by the Passivhaus Institute, offers a rigorous, whole-building approach to transforming that performance without altering the external character that makes these houses worth keeping. The fabric-first strategy is everything: internal insulation carefully detailed to respect the moisture behaviour of stone walls, improved airtightness at the critical junctions, and mechanical ventilation with heat recovery to maintain air quality. The result is a home that feels entirely different to inhabit — warmer, quieter, far less expensive to heat — while looking exactly as it always has from the street.
Sustainable Design is the thread that runs through all of our work, from the smallest renovation to the most ambitious new build. We design homes that are comfortable, designed to last, and built to use energy and materials as efficiently as possible. For clients considering a new home, PassivHaus Design takes that commitment to its most rigorous standard, achieving near-zero energy demand through the performance of the building fabric itself. New Build Design in the countryside around Hullavington, where open farmland meets the edge of the village, calls for the same sensitivity to setting and material that the best historic buildings in the village already demonstrate. And for exceptional sites in the rural landscape beyond the settlement boundary, Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework sets the bar: a new dwelling must be truly outstanding in design, raise standards of architecture, and significantly enhance its immediate context.
If you are considering a project in Hullavington — whether restoring one of the village's stone farmhouses, extending a home along The Street, or improving the thermal performance of a building that deserves to work as well as it looks — we would welcome the conversation.