Walk to the southern edge of Rowde and you find yourself looking down the Caen Hill flight — sixteen locks stepping in a straight line up the hillside, part of twenty-nine that together lift the Kennet and Avon Canal two hundred and thirty-seven feet between Devizes and the Somerset levels. It is one of the great feats of canal-age engineering, completed in 1810 because someone looked at an impossible gradient and decided to solve it with ingenuity rather than avoidance. That spirit is what I admire about Rowde. The village itself carries a quieter ambition in its buildings — a sixteenth-century timber-framed pub at the George and Dragon, refronted in brick in the eighteenth century as tastes changed, and a church at St Matthew's where a fifteenth-century tower survived the rebuilding of 1832–3 by Henry Goodridge because it was too well made to need replacing. Architecture here has always been practical, resourceful, and willing to adapt. Those are values we share.
Award-winning Architects in Rowde
Trusted Architects for Projects in Rowde
I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006, and we are now based in Oxford, working with clients across the country on projects that balance ambition with care for what already exists. Our work on The Deerings, a certified Passivhaus home in Hertfordshire, won the RIBA East Award, and The Old Water Tower — a project that asked how far you can reimagine a historic structure while keeping its essential character — was shortlisted for the RIBA South Awards. I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the Building Design Awards in 2018 and served as a judge for the British Homes Awards in 2025. As a RIBA Chartered Architect, a member of SPAB, and accredited by The Green Register, I bring a perspective shaped by conservation principles and building science in equal measure. In a village like Rowde, where forty listed buildings sit alongside a much larger stock of modern housing, that dual focus matters — the approach shifts depending on the building, but the standard of care does not. Our work has been published in Dezeen, The Modern House Journal and Grand Designs Magazine.
Architectural Services for Homes in Rowde
Extension Design is often the most rewarding route for families in Rowde who want more space without leaving the village. Much of the housing stock here is modern brick-built — the kind of mid-to-late twentieth-century homes that were solidly constructed but rarely designed with natural light, connection to the garden, or energy performance in mind. We design extensions that address all three, working with Wiltshire Council's planning requirements to create spaces that feel generous and considered rather than simply larger. Where a property sits near the canal corridor, there is an opportunity to design with that landscape — opening views toward the water, using the fall of the land to create split-level connections between house and garden. Even for properties along the High Street, where the George and Dragon's timber frame and brick frontage set the visual tone, an extension to the rear can be contemporary in its materials and generous in its glazing while respecting the street's established rhythm.
Renovations call for a different discipline, and Rowde has enough historic fabric to keep an architect thinking. The George and Dragon itself — a sixteenth-century timber frame concealed behind an eighteenth-century brick skin — is a lesson in how buildings here have always been adapted rather than replaced. Smithwick Farmhouse and Myrtle Farmhouse, both early seventeenth-century, carry the marks of three centuries of alteration. Renovating buildings of this kind means understanding how they were made: lime mortars, timber pegging, rubble stone, brick bonds that tell you which century laid them. As a member of SPAB, I believe in reading the building before reaching for a solution. St Matthew's font, designed in 1850 by Sir Matthew Digby Wyatt — who was born in Rowde and lived at Rowdeford House — is a reminder that this village has always attracted people who care about craft and detail.
EnerPHit, the Passivhaus Institute's certified retrofit standard, is particularly well suited to the modern housing in Rowde. Post-war brick construction responds well to external wall insulation, improved airtightness at junctions and openings, and mechanical ventilation with heat recovery — the kind of invisible, rigorous upgrade that transforms comfort and cuts energy bills without altering how the house looks from the street. For the village's older buildings, where external fabric is more sensitive, EnerPHit allows a carefully judged internal approach that respects the character of lime-plastered walls and traditional window proportions while dramatically improving thermal performance.
Sustainable Design is the thread that connects everything we do — from the orientation of a new extension to the insulation strategy for a seventeenth-century farmhouse. New Build Design offers the chance to get performance right from the foundations up, and for any new homes on the edges of Rowde, we design for the specific conditions of this landscape: the clay soils of the vale, the exposure to westerly weather, the relationship between new buildings and the canal-side setting that gives the village its wider identity. PassivHaus Design takes that ambition to its highest level, virtually eliminating the need for conventional heating through exceptional airtightness and heat recovery. Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework provides a route for truly outstanding homes in the open countryside, and the farmland that surrounds Rowde — rolling, working, shaped by centuries of agriculture between Devizes and the Avon vale — is a landscape where architecture of genuine quality could earn its right to be there.
If you are considering a project in Rowde — whether extending a modern home to make the most of the canal-side landscape, renovating one of the village's older buildings with the care it deserves, or building something new that belongs in this place — we would welcome the conversation.