Some buildings teach you patience. The smock mill on the escarpment at Lacey Green is one of them — a timber structure dating to around 1650, the oldest surviving smock mill in England, its machinery over 350 years old. By the mid-twentieth century it had all but collapsed. Then volunteers from the Chiltern Society spent years bringing it back, timber by timber, understanding every joint before replacing it. That kind of work — reading a structure closely, respecting the intelligence of its original makers, refusing to rush — is what I admire most in architecture. It is also the spirit we bring to every project at Gresford Architects. Lacey Green and Loosley Row sit high on the Chiltern escarpment above Princes Risborough, two settlements that have grown together over centuries, their buildings shaped by what was available from the land beneath them: flint from the chalk, brick from the local kilns that gave Kiln Lane its name, timber from the beechwoods that still clothe the hillsides. Both villages have their own conservation areas, and the Chilterns National Landscape wraps around the whole parish. Material and landscape are inseparable here, and that relationship is what makes working in this parish so interesting.
Award-winning Architects in Lacey Green/Loosley Row
Why Clients Across the Country Trust Gresford Architects
I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006, and we are now based at our studio in Oxford, working with clients across the country. We are ARB registered and RIBA Chartered, and I am a member of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings — a membership that shapes how we think about places like Lacey Green and Loosley Row, where so much of the built fabric is historic and still alive. Our RIBA East Award for The Deerings in Hertfordshire showed that a home built to full Passivhaus standards can be architecturally ambitious, not merely energy-efficient. The Old Orchard in Oxfordshire — an EnerPHit retrofit featured in The Modern House and The Spaces — demonstrated that a period home can be transformed thermally without losing the qualities that made it worth keeping. As a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year and a judge at the British Homes Awards, I bring a conviction that sustainability and beauty are collaborators, not competing forces. My accreditation with The Green Register and membership of the Passivhaus Trust reflect how we practise, not just what we believe.
Design for the Chilterns Escarpment
Renovations in Lacey Green and Loosley Row often begin with buildings that have already been through centuries of quiet adaptation — brick-and-flint cottages extended in different eras, timber-framed farmhouses where each generation left its mark. The parish has a number of listed buildings, some dating back several centuries, and the conservation areas in both villages protect streetscapes where these older structures sit alongside Victorian and later additions. St John the Evangelist, built as a chapel of ease from 1823 to 1825 and extended in 1871 with J.P. Seddon's distinctive polychrome chancel, is itself a building that grew in stages. We approach every renovation the same way: reading the building first, understanding its materials and structural logic, before drawing a single line. Buckinghamshire Council is the planning authority, and within the conservation areas any external alteration demands careful justification — a discipline that suits how we work, because it insists on understanding before action.
EnerPHit is particularly well suited to the solid-walled homes that characterise these Chilterns villages. Flint and brick walls, sometimes with lime render, have their own thermal behaviour — they breathe, they absorb moisture, they respond to the seasons in ways that modern materials do not. The EnerPHit standard works with these qualities rather than against them, improving airtightness and insulation without sealing in the damp that can destroy an older wall from within. I have experienced Passivhaus living through a full winter, and the consistent warmth, the absence of cold spots, the quiet — that is what becomes possible in a centuries-old cottage in Loosley Row or a brick farmhouse in Lacey Green when you respect how the building wants to work. PassivHaus Design applies the same calibrated physics to new construction, delivering homes that are comfortable, designed to last, and use energy as efficiently as possible.
Extension Design on the escarpment calls for materials that belong here. Brick and flint have been the Chilterns vocabulary for centuries, and any extension in Lacey Green or Loosley Row must speak that language — or introduce something new that sits honestly alongside it. Scale matters too: the low rooflines and modest proportions of the older cottages set a rhythm that a careless addition can break. We think about old and new not as a problem to solve but as a conversation to continue. Sustainable Design runs through all of this, because buildings that use energy and materials efficiently are not only kinder to the planet but more comfortable to inhabit and more economical to run.
New Build Design in the parish must respond to the Chilterns National Landscape designation, which places a higher bar on the quality and sensitivity of any new development. The landscape here — the beechwoods, the open escarpment, the long views across the vale — is not a backdrop but a context that every new building must engage with. Paragraph 84 of the NPPF is the only route to new homes in the open countryside here — and it is deliberately stringent. The architecture must justify the existence of the building. That aligns exactly with how we work: not design as an afterthought to a location decision, but the inverse — design quality as the reason the building earns permission.
Lacey Green and Loosley Row are places shaped by their materials — flint and brick, timber and chalk — and by the care of the people who have worked with those materials over centuries. If you are considering a project here, whether a sensitive renovation, a carefully planned extension, or something new on the escarpment, we would welcome the conversation.