When Lytton Strachey and Dora Carrington took the lease on the Mill House in Tidmarsh in 1917, they were not just looking for somewhere quiet to write and paint. They were looking for a building that felt right — a place where the sound of the River Pang running beneath the mill wheel, the light through the willows, and the modest scale of the rooms would shape the way they lived and worked. Virginia Woolf visited. Maynard Keynes visited. Something about that house, in that village, drew people. I think about this whenever I consider what makes a home work. It is never just the floor plan. It is the relationship between the building and its setting — the way a house sits with its river, its garden, its street. At Gresford Architects, that relationship is where every project begins.
Award-winning Architects in Tidmarsh
What Tidmarsh Asks of an Architect
Tidmarsh is a small village on the River Pang, between Pangbourne and Theale, sitting within the North Wessex Downs National Landscape and under the planning authority of West Berkshire District Council. It is a place of considerable architectural character for its size. The Church of St Laurence is Grade I listed, with a twelfth-century nave, a very rare thirteenth-century polygonal apse, a Norman south doorway, and thirteenth-century wall paintings in the lancet reveals. The Greyhound pub is a thirteenth-century half-timbered building. The Mill House, the Round House, the Forge, and the barn at Tidmarsh Farm are all Grade II listed. Working here means reading a layered history and responding to it honestly.
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 informs how I approach villages like Tidmarsh, where every building carries the weight of its own story. Our project The Deerings, a Passivhaus home in Hertfordshire, won the RIBA East Award in 2018, and I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the Building Design Awards that same year. I was invited to judge the British Homes Awards in 2025. We are members of the Passivhaus Trust, accredited by The Green Register, and registered with both ARB and RIBA — the kind of grounding that matters when the margin for error is narrow and the setting is this sensitive.
Design That Respects the River and the Landscape
Sustainable Design is central to everything we do, and in Tidmarsh it finds a natural home. The Pang is a chalk stream — one of a globally rare habitat type, fed by springs filtering through the chalk downs above. Building sensitively along a chalk stream means thinking carefully about drainage, ground conditions, and the wider ecological setting. We design homes that tread lightly: careful orientation to capture passive solar gain, natural ventilation that works with the valley's airflow, and materials chosen for their longevity and low environmental impact. These are not additions to the design — they are the design.
Extension Design in Tidmarsh means working with the proportions and materials of existing buildings — many of them brick, flint, tile-hung, or timber-framed — and finding a way to add space that feels as though the house always intended it. The best extensions do not announce themselves. They complete what was already there. For older properties, Renovations require the same instinct: understanding the building's structural logic, its orientation, the way its materials breathe and weather, before deciding where to intervene.
EnerPHit is our approach to bringing older homes in Tidmarsh closer to Passivhaus levels of comfort and efficiency. Solid-walled cottages and converted agricultural buildings lose heat in ways their builders never anticipated, and EnerPHit addresses this systematically — improved insulation, controlled ventilation, better airtightness — without erasing the character that makes these buildings worth living in. PassivHaus Design sets the standard for new construction, and for the rare New Build Design opportunity in a village of this scale, the discipline of Passivhaus ensures that a new home performs beautifully while sitting within the village's existing grain of modest scale and honest materials.
For sites in the wider landscape of the North Wessex Downs, Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework offers a route to truly exceptional rural homes — houses that justify their position in the open countryside through the quality of their architecture and their sensitivity to the land around them.
Strachey and Carrington found something in Tidmarsh that shaped the way they worked. The best architecture does the same — it does not just shelter, it inspires. If you are planning a project here, we would welcome the conversation.