There is something compelling about a village that built itself from the ground beneath it. Market Lavington sits in a gault clay valley between the chalk escarpment of Salisbury Plain and a greensand ridge, and for centuries that heavy clay was dug and fired at the brickworks along the Broadway, producing the red brick and tile that gave the village its face. Walk along the High Street and you can read the process in the buildings themselves — houses that began as timber-framed structures in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were refronted in local brick as fashions allowed, so that what you see today is a Georgian surface laid over a Tudor skeleton. The Old House on Parsonage Lane takes this layering further still: a fourteenth-century aisled hall, the only one of its kind in Wiltshire, wrapped in roughcast stone and later brick, its medieval timber frame still legible inside through seventeenth-century oak panelling and deep chamfered cross beams. That kind of material continuity — clay from the valley, timber from the woodland, stone from the greensand — is what makes a place worth working in carefully.
Award-winning Architects in Market Lavington
Why Homeowners in Market Lavington Trust Gresford Architects
I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006, and we are now based in Oxford, working with clients across the country. My membership of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings reflects something that matters deeply in a village like Market Lavington — the idea that every layer of a building's history has value, and that understanding how a structure has changed over centuries is the starting point for any new work. I am ARB-registered and RIBA Chartered, and my accreditation by The Green Register and the Passivhaus Trust reflects the breadth of what we do: our Passivhaus home The Deerings won the RIBA East Award in 2018, our work has been featured in Dezeen and Grand Designs Magazine, and I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year in 2018 before serving as a judge for the British Homes Awards in 2025. That breadth — from the clay-fired red brick of the village's older buildings to the most rigorous energy performance standards — is what allows us to work confidently across the full range of homes you find here.
How We Work with Homes in Market Lavington
Renovations in Market Lavington mean working with buildings that have already been adapted several times. The refronted houses along the High Street — brick faces over timber frames, new window proportions on older openings — carry the evidence of every generation that altered them. Number 9, with its jettied timber-framed upper floor above a brick ground storey, was once a freestanding building and is now part of the street frontage. Renovating a property like this means reading the structural logic of each phase, understanding which elements are load-bearing and which were decorative, and finding a way forward that respects what has accumulated without treating the building as a museum. As a SPAB member, I approach this kind of work by letting the building's own history guide the design, not by imposing a single period's aesthetic on a structure that belongs to several.
EnerPHit is particularly relevant for the older solid-walled housing stock in Market Lavington. Many of the village's older buildings have walls of local brick or rubblestone with no cavity — excellent for durability but offering little thermal resistance by modern standards. EnerPHit provides a certified retrofit pathway that transforms energy performance without losing the character of the original construction: internal wall insulation with careful moisture management, upgraded windows that respect existing proportions, and mechanical ventilation with heat recovery. For a village where the clay that made the bricks came from the valley floor, stripping those walls back and starting again would mean losing the very thing that connects the buildings to this place.
Extension Design for homes in Market Lavington depends on which layer of the village you are working with. Properties within the conservation area — those Georgian-refronted buildings along the High Street — need extensions that read as a continuation of what is already there: the red brick and tile roofs the refronting established, the window proportions and massing that tie back to the eighteenth-century transformation. The challenge is that these buildings began as something else entirely, so extending them means understanding the full sequence of construction and letting it guide your hand. In the more recent housing built during the twentieth century, the constraints differ but the principle holds: an extension should feel like a natural continuation of the building, not an afterthought. New Build Design is a live consideration. The Market Lavington Neighbourhood Development Plan, made in May 2021, allocated three sites for new housing, and the current local plan review identifies a requirement of around fifty-five additional homes. New homes in a village with this depth of material history need to belong to their own time while understanding the place they are joining — Sustainable Design ensures they do that through considered orientation, natural light, responsible material choices and long-term energy performance.
PassivHaus Design takes that commitment to its most rigorous form, delivering homes that maintain stable internal temperatures through exceptional fabric performance and airtightness — not only kinder to the planet but more comfortable to inhabit, more economical to run and more joyful to live in. Beyond the settlement boundary, where the gault clay gives way to the chalk downland of Salisbury Plain, Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework governs new dwellings in the countryside, requiring truly outstanding or innovative design that enhances its immediate setting — the kind of project where the marriage of the poetic and the practical matters most.
If you are considering a project in Market Lavington — whether renovating one of the village's layered older buildings, improving the energy performance of a solid-walled home, or exploring what a new build on one of the allocated sites might look like — we would welcome the conversation.