What I find compelling about Sunninghill is how clearly you can read the village's history through its buildings. The Church of St Michael and All Angels still holds a zigzag archway from its Norman origins, yet the building around it was rebuilt in the early nineteenth century and then extended again in 1888 by W.H. Crossland — the same architect who designed Royal Holloway College — as a memorial to Thomas Holloway, who is buried in the churchyard. Across the lane stands The Cedars, a Grade II listed Georgian house where Walter Scott once sat in the garden writing two cantos of Marmion. And then there are the later Victorian and Edwardian houses that followed the railway's arrival in 1856, many of them built from brick fired at the Swinley and Burleigh works using the clay deposits that East Berkshire sits upon. Each era left its mark in different materials and different proportions, and that layering is what gives Sunninghill its particular character. At Gresford Architects, working with that kind of accumulated history — respecting it, learning from it, and building well alongside it — is at the heart of everything we do.
Award-winning Architects in Sunninghill
Why Homeowners in Sunninghill Trust Gresford Architects
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, and my membership of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings reflects a particular commitment to understanding how old buildings work — how their materials move, how they breathe, and how new work can sit honestly beside them. That matters in a village like Sunninghill where buildings from the twelfth century to the twenty-first stand within a few streets of each other. Our project The Deerings, a Passivhaus home in Hertfordshire, won a RIBA East Award in 2018, and that same year I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the Building Design Awards. I was invited to judge the British Homes Awards in 2025. We are accredited by The Green Register and members of the Passivhaus Trust, and our work has been featured in Dezeen, The Modern House Journal, Grand Designs Magazine, and the RIBA Journal.
Architectural Services Shaped by Sunninghill's Character
Renovations are where much of the most sensitive architectural work in Sunninghill lies. The village's housing stock spans centuries, from the flint and brick of the older buildings around the church to the substantial Victorian and Edwardian houses that grew up along the high street and surrounding lanes as the railway brought new residents. Renovating a Victorian house built from locally fired brick requires an understanding of the material itself — the way clay brick performs thermally, the lime mortars that allow moisture to move, the proportions of sash windows that were designed for ventilation as much as light. The Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead, as the planning authority, and the Ascot, Sunninghill and Sunningdale Neighbourhood Plan both expect alterations to respect the character of the area, and we share that expectation entirely. Good renovation is not preservation for its own sake — it is about making a building work for how people live now, while honouring the craft that went into its original construction.
EnerPHit is particularly well suited to the housing stock that defines much of Sunninghill. The Victorian and Edwardian houses were built with solid walls, single-glazed windows, and little thought for thermal performance — handsome buildings, but expensive to heat and uncomfortable in the colder months. EnerPHit transforms them as a whole system: improved insulation, airtightness, and mechanical ventilation with heat recovery, all designed together so that the house becomes stable, comfortable, and dramatically more efficient. For a brick-built Victorian house, the difference between a piecemeal approach and a coordinated EnerPHit retrofit is the difference between patching symptoms and solving the problem properly.
Extension Design is where we see many of the best opportunities in Sunninghill. The larger detached houses sit on generous plots and were designed for a different pattern of living — they often feel compartmentalised, cut off from the garden. An extension that opens the ground floor to daylight and the garden, that brings light into the heart of the plan, can transform how a family actually lives. The constraint is that any new work must sit honestly with the original building, respecting its proportions and materials — which is exactly how we think it should be. Sustainable Design threads through all of our work, whether it is a renovation of a Victorian terraced house or an extension to a detached family home. It means understanding how materials age — clay brick, lime mortar, tile — rather than replacing them with modern substitutes. It means positioning rooms to work with the sun rather than against it. It means designing homes that feel good to live in and cost less to heat.
PassivHaus Design represents the most demanding expression of that commitment — homes that maintain stable internal temperatures year-round with minimal mechanical heating. For New Build Design on sites within or around Sunninghill, the Neighbourhood Plan's emphasis on respecting local character means new homes must respond to a very particular grain — the brick and tile that reflects the legacy of the local works at Swinley and Burleigh, the generous spacing between buildings that the village values, the kind of solidity and proportion that the Victorian and Edwardian houses established and that the area expects to see honoured. And for sites in the wider countryside of east Berkshire, Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework provides a route for truly exceptional rural homes — architecture that earns its place through the quality of its design and its sensitivity to the landscape it inhabits.
Sunninghill is a village where each generation of builders has added something to the conversation — Norman stone, Georgian proportion, Victorian brick, and the houses still being shaped today. If you are thinking about a project here, whether it is renovating a period home, retrofitting for comfort and efficiency, or extending a family house, we would welcome the chance to talk it through.