In 1814, a group of local gentlemen met at the King's Arms in Melksham and hatched an extraordinary plan: to build a spa resort to rival Bath. They formed the Melksham Spa Company, raised seven thousand guineas through a tontine, and commissioned a set of neo-classical lodging houses in ashlar stone — tall, three-storey buildings with fluted pilasters and triangular pediments, designed to announce that this was a town of ambition. Only three of the planned six crescent houses were ever built. The spa never rivalled Bath, or even came close. But the buildings survive, and they tell you something important about this place — that Melksham has always been a town that builds with conviction, even when the outcome is uncertain. Walk from the Spa Quarter to Canon Square and you are in a different world entirely: the medieval church of St Michael and All Angels, a small two-storey roundhouse built for the wool trade in the late eighteenth century, a fifteenth-century tithe barn that G. E. Street remodelled into a school in 1878. The town's character is not grand or uniform. It is layered, practical, and full of surprises. That is what makes it interesting to work in as an architect.
Award-winning Architects in Melksham
Sustainable Architecture Rooted in Practice
Gresford Architects began in London in 2006 and is now based in Oxford, working with clients across the country. In a town like Melksham — where the neo-classical ambitions of the Spa Company sit alongside a medieval church, a wool roundhouse, and thousands of new homes on the horizon — the ability to move between periods, materials, and scales is exactly what architecture demands. Our practice is built on the conviction that sustainability and heritage are inseparable, that a building's future depends on understanding its past. We won the RIBA East Award for The Deerings, a Passivhaus home in Hertfordshire, and the RIBA South Awards shortlist for The Old Water Tower. I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the 2018 Building Design Awards and judged the British Homes Awards in 2025. I am ARB-registered and RIBA Chartered, a member of SPAB, and accredited by The Green Register and the Passivhaus Trust. In Melksham, where the spa-era aspirations of 1814 sit alongside today's growth pressures, that balance is essential. Every building here has a story — and the best architecture honours it. Our work has been featured in Dezeen, The Modern House Journal, and Grand Designs Magazine, always grounded in the conviction that buildings should endure.
How We Work With Homes in Melksham
New Build Design is becoming increasingly important in Melksham as the town prepares for substantial growth. Wiltshire Council's Local Plan allocates around 3,950 new homes to Melksham for the period to 2036, placing it among the most significant growth towns in the county. The former Cooper Tires site — fourteen hectares of brownfield land in the heart of the town — represents one of the largest regeneration opportunities in west Wiltshire, earmarked alongside the Old Library site for new homes, employment, and public space. The Joint Melksham Neighbourhood Plan, adopted after a public referendum in July 2025, provides the framework for how that growth should happen. When we design new homes, whether on brownfield sites like Cooper Tires or at settlement edges, we think about how the architecture responds to what already exists: the proportions of the conservation area, the materials palette of ashlar stone and local rubble that the Spa buildings and Canon Square established centuries ago, and the way thoughtful design can create places that feel rooted rather than imposed. Sustainability is woven into every decision from site analysis onward — not an add-on, but the foundation. Passive solar orientation, thermal envelope performance, and material longevity are embedded in every decision from the outset, because homes that are comfortable, durable, and efficient to run are homes that endure.
Extension Design in Melksham is about reading the layers. An extension to one of the Spa lodging houses — ashlar stone, tall proportions, formal rhythm — demands a very different approach from a coursed-rubble cottage tucked away in the lanes behind Canon Square. Both are in the conservation area; both have character worth keeping. The formal Georgian and Regency properties have their own vocabulary; the smaller vernacular buildings speak a plainer language. Our job is to understand which grammar the building is speaking, and add to it rather than interrupt it. Beyond the conservation area, twentieth-century semis and terraces have their own logic — practical, straightforward — and extensions here can be freer, though no less thoughtful. We start every project by asking what the building is trying to be, and how we can make it more itself.
EnerPHit is the certified retrofit standard for older homes that have great character but poor performance. Melksham's pre-twentieth-century buildings — the solid stone cottages, the Regency villas near the Spa, the Victorian terraces — are beautiful to live next to and miserable to live in. Single glazing, solid walls with no cavity, uninsulated roofs, draughty construction: the result is expensive heating bills and cold rooms. EnerPHit changes that. The approach is holistic: insulation selected and detailed for lime mortar and breathable stone, airtight junctions at windows and roof penetrations, high-performance glazing, and heat-recovery ventilation. Done well, the building stays recognisable — no cladding, no erasure — and performs like a new home. It is achievable in the conservation area because it respects what Wiltshire Council cares about: the streetscape, the character, the fabric. The technical and the sensitive are one and the same.
Renovations in Melksham's conservation area are shaped by the same instinct that the Spa Company understood: you build with what came before, not against it. St Michael and All Angels, Grade II* listed, has twelfth-century origins but was enlarged in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries before T. H. Wyatt's extensive remodelling in 1845. Across Canon Square and Church Walk, listed buildings carry the same layered history — modified, extended, and repurposed over centuries, each intervention responding to the one before. Our membership of SPAB shapes every renovation we undertake: honest repair over speculative restoration, respect for original materials, and the confidence to distinguish between fabric that must be preserved and elements that can be thoughtfully improved. PassivHaus Design takes the principles of energy performance to their fullest expression in new construction — superinsulation, airtight building envelopes, and mechanical ventilation with heat recovery creating homes that need almost no conventional heating. It is a standard we have built to and lived in ourselves, and one that is achievable for new homes in and around the town.
The countryside around Melksham is part of its character — to the west and south the gentler vale where the Avon winds through farmland, to the east the North Wessex Downs rising again. For homes in these rural settings, Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework offers a route for genuinely exceptional design, where the building itself becomes an argument for the location. These projects demand you to know the landscape — the geology, the vegetation, the light, the views — and design into it rather than against it.
Melksham is a town that has always built with purpose — from the optimism of the Spa Company in 1814 to the wool roundhouse, the tithe barn, and the quiet confidence of Canon Square. If you are considering a new home, an extension, a renovation, or a retrofit in or around the town, we would welcome the conversation. The best architecture begins with understanding what is already here, and Melksham has more to offer than first meets the eye.