Some villages announce themselves with a grand high street or a picturesque square. Lea, tucked just east of Malmesbury in north Wiltshire, does neither — it reveals itself slowly, a quiet gathering of stone cottages, farmhouses and converted agricultural buildings arranged along lanes that have shifted very little in centuries. The Church of St Giles, with its fourteenth-century chancel and nave and a fifteenth-century west tower, stands as a reminder that people have been building here in local stone for the better part of seven hundred years. What strikes me about a village like this is the unselfconsciousness of its architecture — buildings shaped by need, by available materials, by the slope of the land, rather than by any desire to impress. That is a quality worth understanding before you draw a single line.
Award-winning Architects in Lea
Why Clients Trust Gresford Architects
I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006 and the practice is now based in Oxford, though we work with clients across the country. I am a RIBA Chartered and ARB Registered architect, trained at the Mackintosh School of Architecture in Glasgow, and a member of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, the Passivhaus Trust and The Green Register. That combination matters — it means we bring the same rigour to a sensitive renovation of a centuries-old stone building as we do to designing a new home to the highest energy performance standards. Our project The Deerings, a Passivhaus home in Hertfordshire, won a RIBA East Award, and I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the 2018 Building Design Awards. Our work has been published in Dezeen, Grand Designs Magazine and The Modern House Journal. In 2025 I served as a judge for the British Homes Awards. Whether the project is a listed barn in Buckinghamshire or a contemporary new build, we bring the same attention to place, materials and the way light moves through a room.
Architectural Services for a Village Built in Stone
Renovations in Lea demand an architect who reads the existing building before proposing anything new. The older properties here — stone-walled farmhouses, former agricultural buildings, cottages and barns built from oolitic limestone — carry centuries of adaptation within their walls. St Giles itself tells that story: a medieval church substantially rebuilt in 1878, its fifteenth-century tower surviving because it was sound, the rest renewed because it was not. That kind of honesty about what to keep and what to change is central to how we approach Renovations. My membership of SPAB informs this work — we use lime mortars, breathable finishes and repair techniques that respect the way stone buildings manage moisture, rather than sealing them up with modern materials that cause more problems than they solve.
Extension Design in Lea requires sensitivity to proportion and the particular vocabulary of these stone buildings. A farmhouse or cottage here has developed its own character over centuries — the depth of window reveals, the pitch of the roof in relation to the slope of the land, the way oolitic limestone weathers to a soft grey-gold. An extension needs to understand that specific grammar before introducing something new. Wiltshire Council will assess any proposal for its impact on village character, and in a settlement as tightly woven as Lea, where the relationship between buildings and landscape is delicate, that assessment is exacting. We prepare applications that demonstrate this understanding from the earliest sketch, so that approvals move forward without unnecessary friction.
Sustainable Design runs through everything we do, and in a village like Lea it becomes concrete and urgent. These stone farmhouses and cottages are beautiful, durable, structurally sound — and thermally inefficient. The oolitic limestone that makes them feel permanent is also porous and breathable, and it cannot tolerate modern cement rendering or vapour-seal insulation without developing damp. So the challenge is precise: improve warmth and reduce energy consumption while maintaining the material integrity that makes these buildings worth living in for another few centuries. We analyse each building's fabric, orientation and ventilation carefully, designing interventions that do not just make homes more comfortable and economical to run, but that support their long-term health. EnerPHit offers a certified route here, achieving dramatic improvements in thermal performance while respecting solid-wall construction — which is what Lea is made from.
For new homes, PassivHaus Design delivers the highest certified standard of energy efficiency — exceptional airtightness, minimal heating demand, and year-round comfort without reliance on conventional systems. But new building in or near a village like Lea is rare, and rightly constrained by policy. The village itself has the character it does because most of what stands here was built centuries ago, not last year. Any new dwelling would need to read the landscape and the village's logic before adding to it — and to read it accurately. New Build Design allows us to achieve PassivHaus standards from the ground up while responding to that kind of context. In the open countryside around north Wiltshire, Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework offers a genuine route for a new home of exceptional architectural quality, justified by the quality of its design and its integration with landscape, not by housing numbers.
If you are considering a project in Lea — whether renovating a stone farmhouse, extending a cottage or exploring something entirely new — we would welcome the chance to talk it through.