A moat tells you something about a building's relationship with the land around it. At Southwick Court, the water that still surrounds the manor house has been there for the better part of eight centuries — fed by a leg of the Lambrok stream, encircling a gatehouse from the late fifteenth century and the L-shaped house that Walter Bush remodelled in 1567, his initials carved into a stone in the new wing. What interests me as an architect is how naturally the building sits within that water boundary, as though house and landscape arrived at the same time and neither could exist without the other. That sense of architecture shaped by its setting runs through the whole of Southwick. The village conservation area preserves a medieval street pattern — High Street, West Street, Bridge Street, Back Lane — and the buildings that line those streets carry the marks of every century since, from seventeenth-century stone farmhouses to the rock-faced limestone of St Thomas's Church, completed in 1904 to designs by C.E. Ponting. It is a place where time layers itself visibly, and working here means understanding how each layer relates to the ones before and after it.
Award-winning Architects in Southwick
Why Homeowners in Southwick Trust Gresford Architects
I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006 and we are now based in Oxford, working with clients across the country. My membership of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings reflects an approach that matters in a village like Southwick, where a Grade II* moated manor and dozens of listed buildings share the parish with twentieth-century housing estates: every phase of a building's life has value, and understanding how a structure has changed over the centuries is the starting point for any new work. I am ARB-registered and RIBA Chartered, and my membership of The Green Register and the Passivhaus Trust reflects the breadth of what we do: our Passivhaus home The Deerings won the RIBA East Award in 2018, our work has been featured in Dezeen and Grand Designs Magazine, and I served as a judge for the British Homes Awards in 2025 after being a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year in 2018. That breadth of experience — heritage sensitivity alongside the most rigorous energy performance standards — is what allows us to work confidently across the full range of buildings you find in Southwick.
Architectural Services for Homes in Southwick
Renovations in Southwick demand close attention to the materials and methods that built the village's older properties. Brook House, a seventeenth-century farmhouse standing beside an early sixteenth-century stone-built range, is the kind of building where you cannot simply strip away later additions and assume the original structure will bear the change — each phase of construction may be carrying loads in ways the builders of the next phase took for granted. The Poplars, built around 1650 and re-faced with brick around 1700, shows how buildings in this village have always adapted: the Georgian frontage speaks the architectural language of its own era while the structure behind it belongs to a different century entirely. Working within the Southwick conservation area, where the medieval street pattern shapes every sightline and boundary, means any renovation must respect not just the individual building but the wider grain of the village. As a SPAB member, I approach renovation by reading what a building has already done and finding a way to continue that story rather than interrupt it.
Extension Design for homes in Southwick depends on which part of the village you are in. Properties along the High Street and West Street sit within the conservation area, where Wiltshire Council requires extensions to respond to the scale, materials and character of the existing streetscape. Here the approach might involve local stone or carefully detailed brickwork, proportions that defer to the original building, and rooflines that follow rather than compete. In the estates built during the 1960s and 1970s — which brought a significant surge of modern housing to the village — the design challenge shifts. These homes are often arranged on tighter plots with different spatial constraints, and an extension might involve a single-storey rear addition to open the kitchen to the garden, a side-return to create a more generous ground floor, or a loft conversion that adds a bedroom without extending the footprint at all. The Southwick Neighbourhood Development Plan, made in October 2021, sets local design expectations that sit alongside Wiltshire Council's own policies, and both must be satisfied.
New Build Design is a live question in Southwick. The Neighbourhood Development Plan identifies a requirement for a minimum of twenty-six additional homes by 2038, and finding the right sites within or adjacent to the existing settlement boundary is an active process. New homes here must do more than meet a number — they need to relate to the village's established character, its conservation area, and the landscape setting between Southwick and Trowbridge. Sustainable Design is the thread that runs through every new build we undertake, from site orientation and natural light to material choices and long-term energy performance. We design homes that are comfortable, designed to last and to use energy and materials as efficiently as possible — buildings that respond to where they are and the era in which they are built.
PassivHaus Design takes that commitment to its most rigorous expression, delivering homes that maintain stable, comfortable temperatures year-round through exceptional fabric performance and airtightness — homes that are not only kinder to the planet but more comfortable to inhabit, more economical to run and more joyful to live in. For the older solid-walled buildings in Southwick, EnerPHit offers a certified retrofit path that transforms thermal performance without losing the character of the original construction — the stone walls of a seventeenth-century farmhouse or the brick frontage of a Georgian re-facing can be insulated internally, with careful moisture management at every junction, to create a home that performs as well as a new build while keeping the fabric that connects it to the village's past. Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework applies to new dwellings in the open countryside beyond the settlement boundary, requiring truly outstanding or innovative design that enhances its immediate setting — the kind of project where the marriage of the poetic and the practical matters most.
If you are considering a project in Southwick — whether renovating one of the village's older stone or brick buildings, extending a home on the High Street or in one of the later estates, or exploring what a new build within the Neighbourhood Plan framework might look like — we would welcome the conversation. A place that has been layering architecture for eight centuries deserves care with the next one.