When Edwin Lutyens designed Deanery Garden for the founder of Country Life in 1899, he understood something about Sonning that still holds true — that architecture here is inseparable from landscape. The house sits within a walled orchard that slopes toward the Thames, its mellowed red brick and heavy oak timbers drawing from the same palette as the village around it. Walking through Sonning today, past the brick bridge and along Thames Street, you see that same principle repeated across centuries of building: materials drawn from the ground beneath, forms that respond to the river and the light that reflects off it. As an architect, I find places like this both inspiring and humbling. The standard has been set, and set high. Any new work here has to understand what already exists before it adds a single line to the story.
Award-winning Architects in Sonning
An Architect's Practice Built on Heritage and Sustainability
I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006, and we are now based in Oxford, working with clients across the country. We are RIBA chartered, ARB registered, and members of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, the Passivhaus Trust and The Green Register — a combination of heritage sensitivity and environmental expertise that suits a village like Sonning particularly well. Our project The Deerings, a Passivhaus home in Hertfordshire, won a RIBA East Award in 2018, and in the same year I was shortlisted as Sustainability Architect of the Year at the Building Design Awards. More recently, I was invited to judge the British Homes Awards in 2025. Our work has been featured in Dezeen, Grand Designs Magazine and The Modern House Journal. What connects all of it is a belief that buildings should be comfortable, designed to last and to use energy and materials as efficiently as possible — principles that align naturally with a place where the best buildings have already lasted centuries.
How We Work with Homes in Sonning
Sonning's conservation area, first designated in 1971 and extended in 1996, covers the historic core of the village and includes approximately forty-three listed buildings. The Church of St Andrew, Grade II* listed, has Norman origins with flint walls and Bath stone dressings, restored by Henry Woodyer in 1853. Deanery Garden holds Grade I status. This density of listed and historic buildings means that Renovations work in Sonning requires a particular depth of understanding — not just of conservation regulations, but of the materials, construction methods and design intentions behind each building. As a SPAB member, I approach every renovation by understanding the building first: how it was made, how it has changed, and what it needs to remain sound for another century. Planning applications in Sonning are determined by Wokingham Borough Council, and their conservation officers will expect proposals that demonstrate genuine respect for the character of the area.
Many of the older homes in Sonning — the Georgian cottages along Thames Street, the Victorian and Edwardian houses set back behind garden walls — were built beautifully but perform poorly by modern standards. Solid walls, single-glazed windows, draughty timber floors: these are buildings that cost far more to heat than they should and leave their occupants less comfortable than they deserve to be. EnerPHit, the Passivhaus Institute's certified retrofit standard, offers a way to address this without stripping away the character that makes these homes worth preserving. We applied EnerPHit principles to The Old Orchard in Oxfordshire — a timber-clad retrofit that transformed the building's thermal performance while respecting its setting. For a listed or conservation area property in Sonning, the same rigour applies but with additional care around permissions and materials. The goal is the same: a home that is warmer, quieter, more energy-efficient and genuinely pleasant to live in, achieved through intelligent improvement rather than wholesale replacement.
Extension Design in a conservation area like Sonning demands sensitivity to proportion, materials and sightlines. A good extension here does not announce itself — it reads as a natural continuation of what was already there, using brick and detailing that sit comfortably alongside the existing building and its neighbours. We design extensions that improve how the whole house works, bringing in light, connecting rooms to gardens and creating space that feels generous without overwhelming the original form. Sustainable Design is woven through every project we take on, because sustainability is not a separate consideration but the discipline that shapes every decision from the earliest sketch to the final specification.
For the rare opportunities that arise on the edges of the village and in the surrounding countryside, New Build Design and PassivHaus Design allow us to create homes from the ground up that deliver outstanding thermal comfort, superb air quality and dramatically reduced energy costs. Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework provides a planning route for exceptional homes in the open countryside, where the design quality must genuinely enhance its setting — the Thames meadows, the ancient hedgerows, the views back toward the village and its church tower. These are demanding briefs, but they are exactly the kind of work we find most rewarding.
If you are considering a project in Sonning — whether that is a careful renovation of a listed building, an extension that respects the conservation area, or something entirely new — we would welcome the conversation.