Steeple Ashton takes its name from something that no longer exists. The stone spire that once rose to nearly 186 feet — second in Wiltshire only to Salisbury Cathedral — was struck by lightning in July 1670, and struck again that October while workmen were still making repairs. It was never rebuilt. What remains is the Church of St Mary the Virgin, a Grade I listed Perpendicular masterpiece funded in the late fifteenth century by two clothiers, Robert Long and Walter Lucas, each funding an aisle of their own. That story tells you a great deal about this village: the wealth that shaped it, the ambition that built it, and the resilience that kept it going when its defining feature was lost. As an architect, I find that quality deeply compelling — a place where the buildings carry the evidence of prosperity, disaster and renewal in their very fabric.
Award-winning Architects in Steeple Ashton
Why Homeowners in Steeple Ashton Trust Gresford
Gresford Architects was founded in London in 2006 and is now based in Oxford. We are a RIBA Chartered and ARB Registered practice working with clients across the country on projects ranging from Grade II listed renovations to certified Passivhaus new builds. In a village like Steeple Ashton, where timber-framed houses sit alongside limestone ashlar and a fifteenth-century church shares a green with a seventeenth-century market cross, the work demands an architect who understands historic fabric at a structural level. My membership of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings informs every historic project we take on — the principle that repair should be honest, that materials should be compatible with the original construction, and that each generation's work should be legible rather than hidden. 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 was invited to judge the British Homes Awards in 2025.
How We Work With Homes in Steeple Ashton
Renovations are at the heart of what many homes in Steeple Ashton need. The village's remarkable collection of timber-framed buildings — many rebuilt after a devastating fire in 1503, with the characteristic curved braces in their upper panels that mark them as products of that single period of reconstruction — requires an architect who can read how these structures work before proposing any intervention. Timber framing with brick nogging behaves very differently from solid masonry: the frame moves, the infill panels breathe, and any renovation that ignores this risks doing more harm than good. Church Farmhouse, a timber-framed building with sixteenth-century origins and stone slate roofs, is a fine example of the kind of layered construction we encounter here — original framing, later extensions in different materials, each phase telling its own story. Working with buildings like these means understanding every layer before touching any of them.
EnerPHit, the Passivhaus Institute's standard for retrofit, is especially relevant to the older homes in Steeple Ashton. The village's timber-framed buildings — many rebuilt after 1503 with their characteristic curved braces — combined with later brick infill and stone slate roofing, lose heat through patterns that a standard retrofit would misread. A timber-framed house with nogging panels and a stone slate roof behaves very differently from a modern cavity-wall dwelling: the frame moves seasonally, the infill panels breathe, and moisture management is critical to the long-term survival of the structure itself. EnerPHit provides the rigour to get this right: modelling the specific wall build-up of these post-fire structures, designing insulation that allows the frame to continue breathing, and introducing mechanical ventilation with heat recovery to maintain air quality without compromising the envelope. The result is a home that is warmer, quieter and significantly cheaper to heat — and crucially, a timber frame that is not put at risk by the condensation and decay that many well-intentioned retrofits inadvertently cause.
Extension Design in Steeple Ashton calls for sensitivity to the existing buildings and their setting. The village still retains the layout of the small market town it once was, with properties arranged along a principal street that opens out onto the green where the market cross — dated 1679 — still stands. Wiltshire Council, as the local planning authority, will expect any extension to respect the scale, materials and proportions of the existing building and its neighbours. For a timber-framed house this might mean a contemporary addition in complementary materials that reads clearly as new work; for a later stone or brick property it might mean picking up the local limestone or the brick of the 1647 manor house. We treat each site on its own terms, designing extensions that feel inevitable rather than imposed.
Sustainability is not a philosophy we impose on the buildings of Steeple Ashton — it is one they already embody. The fifteenth-century builders who raised St Mary the Virgin with its thick limestone walls, the post-1503 carpenters who framed and braced the village's timber houses to last centuries, the later stonemasons who repaired and extended these structures in compatible materials — they were all designing for longevity and working with the site rather than against it. Sustainable Design, for us, means following the same principle with the tools modern physics gives us. PassivHaus Design takes those principles to their highest measurable standard, delivering exceptional thermal comfort and minimal energy demand. New Build Design, where opportunities arise in or around the village, can draw on the local materials palette — limestone, timber framing, clay tile — to create something that sits within the village grain while meeting the most demanding modern performance targets. And for exceptional sites in the wider Wiltshire countryside, Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework offers a route to a truly outstanding dwelling.
If you are considering a project in Steeple Ashton — whether restoring a timber-framed house to modern comfort standards, extending a home beside the green, or building something new in this part of west Wiltshire — we would welcome the conversation.