You can read the economic history of a town in its walls, and Hungerford rewards that kind of looking. Walk the High Street and you see timber-framed buildings re-fronted in brick during the coaching era of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries — the town's medieval bones dressed up for a new age of prosperity. What catches my eye as an architect is the brickwork itself: blue headers laid with red stretchers in a pattern that repeats along the street with just enough variation to tell you these were individual builders responding to a shared tradition, not a developer rolling out a uniform façade. There is Bath stone here too, arriving after the Kennet and Avon Canal opened in 1810 and brought materials that would have been uneconomical to cart overland. Every surface tells a story of trade, craft and practical economy — qualities that still matter when you are designing or adapting a building in a place like this.
Award-winning Architects in Hungerford
Trusted Architects for Heritage and Sustainability
I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006, and we now work with clients across the country from our studio in Oxford. Our work sits at the intersection of heritage sensitivity and environmental performance — the marriage of the poetic and the practical that I believe defines good architecture. In a town like Hungerford, where the conservation area encompasses a High Street full of listed buildings and the North Wessex Downs National Landscape wraps around the settlement on every side, that combination is not optional but essential. We are RIBA chartered and ARB registered, and my membership of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings reflects a particular commitment to understanding historic fabric before proposing change. My wife Phoebe is a conservation architect, and between us there is a deep shared respect for what earlier builders achieved and a determination to work with it rather than against it. Our Passivhaus project The Deerings won a RIBA East Award in 2018, the same year I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the Building Design Awards. In 2025 I was invited to judge the British Homes Awards. We are members of the Passivhaus Trust and accredited by The Green Register — commitments that mean something practical when you are trying to make a Georgian coaching inn or a Victorian terrace genuinely comfortable to live in without stripping away what makes it worth living in.
Architectural Services Shaped by Hungerford's Character
Renovations in Hungerford demand an architect who can read the layers — a timber frame behind a Georgian brick façade, an eighteenth-century shopfront above a medieval cellar, a roof structure that has been adapted and extended over three or four centuries. The conservation area, designated in 1974, protects the distinctive character of the town's medieval street plan with its long burgage plots running back from the High Street. West Berkshire Council, which handles planning applications for Hungerford, expects proposals within the conservation area to demonstrate a clear understanding of that character and the contribution each building makes to it. We approach Renovations with the same discipline: understand the building first, its materials and its construction logic, and then propose changes that respect its history while making it work for the people living in it now. Care, patience and genuine curiosity about how a building was made are not soft skills — they are the foundation of good renovation work.
Many of the properties along Hungerford's High Street and in the streets running off it are solid-walled Georgian and Victorian buildings — beautiful to look at but often expensive to heat and prone to draughts. EnerPHit offers a Passivhaus-certified retrofit pathway that addresses exactly this challenge. By improving airtightness, adding carefully positioned internal or external insulation, upgrading glazing and introducing mechanical ventilation with heat recovery, we can transform the thermal performance of a period property without compromising its character. For homeowners in Hungerford living in a brick-fronted coaching-era house with single-glazed sash windows and no insulation, the difference is profound — not just in energy bills but in day-to-day comfort, warmth that stays even and consistent through the coldest months, and air quality that improves throughout the year.
The North Wessex Downs National Landscape surrounds Hungerford, and the countryside beyond the town boundary presents a different kind of architectural opportunity. Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework provides a route to building a truly exceptional home in the open countryside — one where the quality of the design itself justifies the granting of planning permission in a location where development would not normally be permitted. This is architecture at its most demanding, requiring a building that responds to its landscape setting with real ambition and originality. Sustainable Design is fundamental to this — a Paragraph 84 home should be exemplary in its environmental performance as well as its aesthetic quality, and we approach every such project with PassivHaus principles woven into the design from the earliest sketch. New Build Design in and around Hungerford, whether on a rural site or a plot within the town, needs to respond to the materials palette and the spatial character of the settlement — the rhythm of the High Street, the relationship between buildings and the long garden plots behind them, the way the town sits in the valley of the River Kennet.
Extension Design in Hungerford often means working within the conservation area and alongside listed buildings, which requires a confident understanding of how new work can sit alongside old. The best extensions do not mimic what is already there but respond to it — picking up the proportions, the material logic, the way light enters a room — and then adding something that could only belong to the present. Sustainable Design runs through every service we offer, from the thermal performance of a new extension to the material choices in a renovation, to the broader ambition of a PassivHaus Design project that delivers exceptional comfort, outstanding air quality and near-zero energy bills from the first day of occupation.
Hungerford's buildings carry centuries of adaptation — timber frames behind brick façades, Bath stone that arrived by canal, blue and red brickwork laid with the confidence of local craft. That spirit of thoughtful change, of making something better while respecting what came before, is exactly how we approach every project. If you are considering work on a home in Hungerford or in the countryside of the North Wessex Downs, we would welcome the opportunity to talk about what is possible.