The name tells you something about this place before you even arrive. Twyford — the double ford — marks the point where two branches of the River Loddon could be crossed, and that simple fact of geography has shaped the village ever since. First it drew the Bath Road through, bringing coaching inns and the traffic of the turnpike era. Then, in 1839, the Great Western Railway opened its station here, and Twyford became a junction — a place where journeys branched, where the main line west met the Henley branch, where a quiet agricultural village began to acquire a second, Victorian identity. What interests me as an architect is how clearly you can still read those two chapters in the built fabric. The older village along the High Street and London Road, with its timber-framed and brick coaching-era buildings, and the Station conservation area a short walk away, with its two-storey GWR workers' cottages along Brook Street and the terraces of Waltham Road. Two conservation areas for two distinct periods of growth, each with its own architectural logic, its own materials, its own sense of scale.
Award-winning Architects in Twyford
An Award-Winning Practice Working Across the Country
I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006, and we now work with clients across the country from our studio in Oxford. Our work has always been driven by the belief that sustainability is not a constraint but an opportunity — a force to create homes that are more comfortable to inhabit, more economical to run and more joyful to live in. That conviction runs through everything we do, whether we are designing a new home from scratch or helping someone transform a Victorian terrace into a building that performs as well as it looks. We are RIBA chartered and ARB registered, and our Passivhaus project The Deerings won a RIBA East Award in 2018. That same year I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the Building Design Awards, and in 2025 I was invited to judge the British Homes Awards. We are members of the Passivhaus Trust, accredited by The Green Register, and my membership of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings reflects a deep commitment to understanding historic fabric — something that matters in a village like Twyford where the oldest buildings, such as the Duke of Wellington on the High Street, date back centuries. Our projects have been featured in Dezeen, The Modern House Journal and Grand Designs Magazine, and we bring that same ambition and attention to detail to every commission, regardless of scale.
Architecture That Responds to Twyford's Layers
Twyford has grown substantially since the Second World War, and the opportunities for thoughtful Extension Design are everywhere — in the estates to north and south, in the Victorian terraces around the station, in the coaching-era houses along the High Street. These are solid, practical homes, many of them ready for something more ambitious. A well-designed extension can transform how a family uses their home — opening up a kitchen to a garden, creating a ground-floor room that connects indoor and outdoor living, adding a workspace that did not exist when the house was built. The Station conservation area, with its GWR workers' cottages and terraces, and the older village conservation area along the High Street and London Road both require a sensitive approach, and Wokingham Borough Council will expect proposals to demonstrate an understanding of that local character. That discipline produces the best work. Twyford's extensions succeed when they listen to what came before — to the proportions and materials of coaching inns or Victorian terraces — and then add something that could only belong to now.
Many of the Victorian and Edwardian properties in Twyford, particularly around the Station conservation area with its GWR-era cottages and terraces, are solid-walled buildings that can be beautiful to look at but expensive to heat. EnerPHit is the Passivhaus-certified retrofit standard that addresses exactly this challenge. By improving airtightness, adding carefully positioned insulation, upgrading glazing and introducing mechanical ventilation with heat recovery, we can dramatically improve the thermal performance of a period home without compromising its character. For homeowners in Twyford living in a Brook Street cottage or a Waltham Road terrace with single-glazed windows and no insulation, the difference is felt immediately — even, consistent warmth through the coldest months, better air quality throughout the year, and energy bills that reflect a building working with its occupants rather than against them.
Sustainable Design runs through every service we offer, from the material choices in an extension to the energy strategy for a whole-house renovation. Twyford is a working village — families commuting to Reading or London, maintaining homes that range from coaching-era buildings on the High Street to mid-century estates on either side of the railway. Sustainability for homeowners in Twyford is not an abstract ideal but a practical question: how do you make the home you already have work better, last longer, and use less energy? We approach that question with rigour and creativity, drawing on PassivHaus Design principles to deliver homes that are comfortable, designed to last and to use energy and materials as efficiently as possible. Renovations across every era of Twyford's housing stock require an architect who understands how older buildings were constructed and how to improve them without losing what makes them worth keeping.
For those looking beyond the village, the countryside around Twyford and the Loddon valley offers the kind of setting where New Build Design and Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework can come into play. Paragraph 84 provides a route to building a truly exceptional home in the open countryside, where the quality of the design itself justifies planning permission in a location where development would not normally be permitted. It is architecture at its most demanding and most rewarding, and we approach every such project with the same sustainability principles woven in from the earliest sketch.
Twyford has been shaped by movement — by the Bath Road, by the railway, by the steady growth of a village that keeps finding new reasons to evolve. That spirit of thoughtful adaptation is something we understand well. If you are considering work on a home in Twyford or the surrounding countryside, we would welcome the conversation about what is possible.