Salisbury is one of Europe's great planned cities, and it was designed by an architect's instinct. In 1220, Bishop Richard Poore abandoned the cramped hilltop fortress at Old Sarum and laid out an entirely new settlement on the water meadows below — a grid of streets forming some twenty rectangular blocks, each known as a chequer, with the cathedral rising to the south as both spiritual anchor and architectural statement. That deliberate relationship between public building and private dwelling, between the grand gesture and the everyday street, is something I find endlessly compelling. Eight centuries later, Salisbury's medieval grid is still legible, the chequers still define the city's rhythm, and the challenge for anyone working on homes in Salisbury is the same one Bishop Poore understood: that the quality of individual buildings determines the quality of the whole place.
Award-winning Architects in Salisbury
Trusted Expertise for a City Shaped by Craft
I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006, and we are now based in Oxford, working with clients across the country. A city like Salisbury — with 641 listed buildings, 38 of them Grade I — demands a practice that understands both the technical rigour of heritage work and the ambition to make buildings perform better for the people who live in them. I am an ARB-registered and RIBA Chartered Architect, a member of SPAB, the Passivhaus Trust, and The Green Register. That combination of conservation knowledge and energy performance expertise is not common, and in Salisbury it matters. We won the RIBA East Award for The Deerings in 2018, were shortlisted for the RIBA South Awards for The Old Water Tower, and I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the Building Design Awards the same year. Our work has been featured in Dezeen, The Modern House Journal, and Grand Designs Magazine, and in 2025 I was invited to judge the British Homes Awards. What connects all of this is a belief that the best architecture marries the poetic and the practical — that a building can be comfortable, designed to last, and use energy and materials as efficiently as possible, while still being joyful to inhabit.
Architecture That Honours Eight Centuries of Making
Renovations in Salisbury require an understanding of construction traditions that span from the medieval to the Georgian and beyond. The city's oldest domestic buildings are timber-framed structures within the original chequers, some dating to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, their frames often concealed behind later facades of flint, brick, or render. The Cathedral Close — the largest in Britain — contains a remarkable sequence of buildings from the thirteenth century through to the eighteenth, where medieval stone walls sit alongside the elegant ashlar frontages of houses like Mompesson House. Working on homes in Salisbury means reading the layers of alteration that centuries of occupation leave behind, understanding which interventions serve the building and which undermine it, and knowing when restraint is the most creative response. Our membership of SPAB shapes how we approach this work — with respect for original fabric, a commitment to honest repair, and the confidence to intervene where doing so genuinely improves how a building functions.
EnerPHit is our certified retrofit standard, and in a city where so much of the housing stock predates any concept of thermal performance, it represents one of the most meaningful improvements we can offer. Many homes in Salisbury — Georgian terraces along the grid streets, Victorian villas in the suburbs, the older buildings within the conservation area — have solid walls, draughty windows, and heating systems working far harder than they need to. An EnerPHit retrofit addresses the entire building envelope: appropriate insulation sympathetic to the wall construction, mechanical ventilation with heat recovery, and meticulous attention to airtightness. In a conservation setting, the external appearance need not change at all — the transformation is in comfort, running costs, and the building's long-term viability. For listed buildings, we bring the heritage sensitivity that our conservation projects and SPAB training have instilled, ensuring that improved performance never comes at the expense of the fabric that makes these buildings significant.
Extension Design in Salisbury is shaped by the tension between a tightly planned medieval city and the way people live now. The chequers were designed for a different era — plots that made sense in the thirteenth century can feel constrained by twenty-first-century expectations. Extending a home within the Salisbury conservation area means working with Wiltshire Council's planning team to demonstrate that a new addition respects the established character of the street and the materials that define it. In the city centre, that often means responding to flint, Chilmark stone, or the chequerwork patterning of dressed flint alternating with stone blocks that is so characteristic of Salisbury's vernacular. Beyond the conservation area, in the city's Victorian and Edwardian suburbs, the design conversation shifts — but the principle remains that the best extensions grow from what is already there, completing a building rather than contradicting it.
Sustainable Design runs through everything we do, and in Salisbury it takes a particular form. A city with this depth of heritage already embodies one of the most sustainable principles in architecture: the idea that the greenest building is the one that already exists. Our approach to every project — whether a renovation, an extension, or a new build — begins with reducing energy demand, selecting materials with low embodied carbon, and designing for longevity. We think about orientation, natural ventilation, thermal mass, and the long-term performance of the building envelope from the earliest sketch. PassivHaus Design sets our benchmark for new-build energy performance, achieving homes that need almost no conventional heating through superinsulation, airtight construction, and heat recovery ventilation — a standard we have delivered and one that is as relevant to a new home on the edges of Salisbury as it is anywhere in the country.
New Build Design has its place in Salisbury too, particularly as the city grows to meet the housing needs identified in Wiltshire Council's development strategy. New homes in Salisbury carry a particular responsibility — they arrive in a city whose quality was established by the ambition of its original plan, and they should meet that standard rather than dilute it. We design new homes that are specific to their site, their orientation, and the materials and proportions of their context, built to perform as well as they look. For sites in the open Wiltshire countryside beyond the city, Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework offers a route for exceptional homes in rural settings — not a loophole, but a recognition that outstanding architectural quality and landscape sensitivity can justify development where standard policy would not. The chalk downland and river valleys around Salisbury, some within the Cranborne Chase and West Wiltshire Downs Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, are landscapes where design ambition and environmental performance become inseparable.
Salisbury was designed with intention — every street, every chequer, every relationship between building and space was a conscious act of making. If you are considering a renovation, an extension, a retrofit, or a new home in or around the city, we would welcome the conversation. The best work in a place like this starts with understanding what has been built before, and carrying that care forward.