Hinton House in Hurst is one of those buildings that teaches you something every time you look at it. Built around 1600 to 1620 in red brick, it is Grade II* listed not just for its age but for an idea — a triple pile plan that placed the hall and parlour side by side, pushed the service rooms to the rear, and ran a corridor with the staircase between them. At the time, this was a radical departure from how English houses were organised, anticipating by decades the kind of domestic planning that would eventually become standard. I find that remarkable. Four hundred years ago, someone in this Berkshire village was rethinking how a home should work — how people move through it, where light falls, how rooms relate to one another. That instinct, the belief that a house should be designed around the way its occupants actually live, is the thread that runs through everything we do at Gresford Architects.
Award-winning Architects in Hurst
Why Clients Across the Country Trust Gresford
We founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006 and are now based in Oxford, working with clients across the country. The same question that drove the builder of Hinton House — how should this home actually work? — is the one we ask at the start of every project. I am a RIBA chartered and ARB registered architect, a member of the Passivhaus Trust and the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, and accredited by The Green Register. My wife Phoebe is a conservation architect, and her perspective has sharpened my own understanding of how old buildings carry meaning as well as structure. Our Passivhaus home The Deerings won a RIBA East Award in 2018, and that 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. Whether a project involves a Grade II* listed house like Hinton House or a twentieth-century family home that needs to work harder for the people inside it, the approach is the same — listen to the building, listen to the client, and find the design that serves both.
Architectural Services for Homes in Hurst
Hurst is a village that has held its shape carefully. The Development Limit drawn up in the 1970s has kept the parish from sprawling outward, which means that much of the growth here happens within the existing building stock — homes extended, adapted, opened up to meet the needs of families whose lives have changed since the house was built. Extension Design in Hurst is about understanding that relationship between a home and its setting. The older properties along Church Hill and Tape Lane sit among mature gardens and established boundaries, their red brick and tile a quiet echo of the materials that built Hinton House and the 1612 brick tower of St Nicholas Church. A good extension here should feel as considered as those buildings — drawing on the same material palette, responding to the same scale, but bringing contemporary performance in terms of light, insulation and spatial flow. Wokingham Borough Council, as the local planning authority, takes a careful view of development in the parish, and rightly so.
For homeowners in Hurst with older properties — and there are many, given the village's long history stretching back to the Norman dedication of St Nicholas Church between 1078 and 1084 — EnerPHit offers a way to transform how a home performs without losing what makes it worth keeping. The approach is certified and precise: a detailed survey of the existing construction, then targeted improvements to insulation, airtightness and ventilation, each designed around the specific building rather than applied from a standard template. A house built with solid brick walls and single-glazed windows may look handsome from the lane, but inside it is working against its occupants — cold in winter, expensive to heat, draughty in ways that no amount of curtain fabric can resolve. EnerPHit changes that equation, and it does so by working with the existing structure, much as the builders of Hurst House in 1847 worked with the Tudor bones of the mansion Richard Warde had built three centuries earlier.
Renovations in Hurst call for the same sensitivity. A village with a Grade I listed church, Grade II* listed houses, and a fabric that spans nearly a thousand years demands an architect who reads a building before drawing on it. My membership of SPAB shapes how we approach every renovation — not as a set of rules to follow, but as a way of thinking about buildings as things that accumulate meaning over time. Sustainable Design is woven through all of this: the orientation of a new extension, the specification of insulation in a retrofit, the material choices that reduce a building's carbon footprint over its lifetime. PassivHaus Design takes that ambition further, delivering homes that maintain stable temperatures year-round with almost no conventional heating — buildings that are more comfortable to inhabit, more economical to run, and more joyful to live in. Where new homes are appropriate within the parish, New Build Design under Wokingham Borough Council's planning framework must respect the established character that the Development Limit has protected for half a century. And beyond the village boundary, in the open countryside between Hurst and the surrounding parishes, Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework offers a route for truly exceptional homes — architecture that earns its place in the landscape through quality of design rather than precedent.
Hurst is a village where good domestic planning has a longer history than most people realise. If you are considering a project here — an extension that reshapes how your home works, a retrofit that transforms how it performs, or a new home that belongs in this carefully held landscape — we would welcome the conversation.