Silverstone is known the world over for the circuit, but the village itself tells a quieter and, to my mind, more interesting story. It grew up at the edge of Whittlewood Forest — a medieval royal hunting ground that once stretched across this part of Northamptonshire — and its unusual layout still carries the evidence. Three distinct clusters rather than one neat centre: a compact settlement around the church at a crossroads to the east, a long street to the west now called West End, and Cattle End to the south. That scattered pattern is the fingerprint of piecemeal forest-edge clearance, assarts carved from woodland over centuries. The medieval trade was timber from the forest, harvested through coppicing. By the late eighteenth century the village was home to tree-fellers and hewers, sawyers and hurdlers, spoke-choppers and lath-renders — the kind of making that depends on understanding material. I have always believed architecture shares that quality. The best buildings come from knowing what you are working with: the site, the climate, the way a material weathers and ages.
Award-winning Architects in Silverstone
Our Work in Silverstone
I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006, and we are now based in Oxford, working with clients across the country. I am an ARB-registered and RIBA-chartered architect, a member of the Passivhaus Trust, the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, and The Green Register. Our RIBA East Award for The Deerings — a certified Passivhaus home in Hertfordshire — showed that precision engineering and genuine architectural warmth can coexist. I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the 2018 Building Design Awards and served as a judge for the British Homes Awards in 2025. That breadth of experience, from heritage restoration to certified low-energy new construction, shapes everything we do.
How We Work with Homes in Silverstone
PassivHaus Design is where our thinking often starts for new homes in Silverstone. The village has grown significantly in recent years, and with that growth comes an opportunity to build homes that are genuinely engineered for comfort, economy and resilience. A Passivhaus home uses so little energy for heating that conventional systems become virtually unnecessary — the fabric of the building does the work. For a village that once sustained itself through an intimate understanding of materials, there is something fitting about homes designed with that same rigour and care.
Sustainable Design runs through every project we take on. In Silverstone it means responding to the context — the openness of the landscape at the forest edge, the relationship between the village's three historic clusters, the mix of older stone and newer construction. Material choices, orientation, ventilation strategies: these are not add-ons but the foundation of how a building performs and feels over decades.
Extension Design is often the most practical route for homeowners in Silverstone who want more space without leaving the village. For properties within the conservation area — which covers Stocks Hill, the lower parts of Little London and High Street, and most of Church Street — West Northamptonshire Council requires careful attention to scale, materials and the character of what already exists. The most successful extensions take their cues from context rather than imposing something foreign, and we find that approach produces better architecture regardless of whether the planning framework demands it.
Renovations in the conservation area begin with understanding the building. The nine listed buildings in Silverstone — all Grade II, including the Church of St Michael rebuilt in 1884 to a Gothic Revival design by James Piers St Aubyn — represent the formal record, but many unlisted properties along Church Street and Stocks Hill contribute just as much to the village's character. EnerPHit, the Passivhaus Institute's certified retrofit standard, offers a rigorous route to transforming the thermal performance of older homes without compromising the fabric that makes them worth keeping.
Where the ambition is a new home beyond the village boundary, New Build Design and Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework provide the route. Paragraph 84 permits architecturally exceptional homes in the open countryside — the quality of the design itself must justify the departure from normal planning policy. The landscape around Silverstone, where farmland meets the remnants of ancient woodland, rewards architecture that sits thoughtfully in its setting.
Silverstone has always been a place where making matters — from medieval timber workers to the precision engineers on its doorstep today. If you are considering a new build, an extension, a renovation or a retrofit here, we would welcome the conversation. Get in touch.