Some villages are defined by a church or a high street. Upper Bucklebury is defined by a common. Three hundred and fifty hectares of oak, ash and beech woodland wrap around this hilltop settlement, and the relationship between the built and the wild here is unusually direct — step out of almost any front door and within a few paces you are on open heathland. That proximity shapes everything about how homes in Upper Bucklebury feel. Light filters differently through a canopy of mature trees, views change with the seasons, and the boundary between garden and common is often no more than a low fence or a hedge. As an architect, I find that kind of setting irresistible. It asks you to think carefully about how a building meets its landscape — not to dominate or to retreat, but to sit well within it. At Gresford Architects, that is the starting point for everything we design: buildings that belong where they are, that respond to their setting, and that reward the people who live in them.
Award-winning Architects in Upper Bucklebury
Trusted by Homeowners Across Berkshire and Beyond
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, a member of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, accredited by The Green Register, and a member of the Passivhaus Trust. That breadth of expertise matters in a place like Upper Bucklebury, where the architecture spans centuries — from the flint and ferricrete walls of the twelfth-century Church of St Mary in the valley below, to the twentieth-century houses that grew up around the common as the village expanded. Our work on The Deerings, a Passivhaus home that won a RIBA East Award in 2018, reflects the same values we bring to every project: comfort, sustainability, and a deep respect for the character of a place. I was also a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the Building Design Awards that year, and in 2025 I was invited to judge the British Homes Awards. Our project The Old Water Tower was shortlisted for a RIBA South Award in 2016, and our work has been featured in Dezeen, The Modern House Journal, and Grand Designs Magazine.
Designing for Life on the Edge of the Common
Extension Design is where we see some of the most rewarding opportunities in Upper Bucklebury. Many of the homes here date from the mid to late twentieth century, built as the village grew from a small hamlet into the largest residential area in the parish. These are solid, well-proportioned houses, but they were often designed for a different way of living — smaller kitchens, separate dining rooms, limited connection to the garden. An extension that opens the ground floor to the woodland views, that brings daylight deep into the plan, and that treats the common as part of the home's experience rather than just a backdrop — that is the kind of work we do well. West Berkshire Council, as the planning authority, expects extensions in the North Wessex Downs National Landscape to respect the character of their setting, and we share that expectation. The best extensions here use materials and proportions that sit comfortably alongside the existing building while being clearly of their own time.
EnerPHit is particularly well suited to homes in Upper Bucklebury. The village's housing stock includes a significant number of buildings from the 1950s through to the 1980s — cavity wall construction, single-glazed windows, uninsulated floors — that are ripe for deep retrofit. EnerPHit addresses these as an integrated system: improved insulation, airtightness and mechanical ventilation with heat recovery, all designed together to transform how a home performs. For a house on the edge of the common, where exposure to wind and weather is more pronounced than in a sheltered valley, the difference is transformative. Rooms that were cold in winter and overheated in summer become stable, comfortable, and genuinely pleasurable to inhabit year-round.
Renovations in the older parts of Bucklebury parish demand a different sensitivity. The conservation area, designated in 1971, protects the historic core around the valley, where buildings like the Church of St Mary — built of flint, tile, rubble and ferricrete with Bath stone dressings, its late Norman south doorway added around 1170 — set the material standard for the settlement. Working with these materials requires an understanding of how they move, how they breathe, and how new interventions can sit alongside fabric that has weathered for eight or nine centuries. My membership of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings reflects that commitment — it is not a credential we list for decoration, but a way of thinking about old buildings that shapes every renovation we undertake.
Sustainable Design is the thread that connects all of our work, whether in a conservation setting or on a modern plot at the edge of the common. It means orienting buildings to capture passive solar gain, specifying materials that are honest and durable, and designing homes that are comfortable, economical to run, and kinder to the planet. PassivHaus Design takes this to its most demanding standard — homes that maintain stable temperatures year-round with minimal mechanical heating, achieving the kind of energy performance that the North Wessex Downs National Landscape, with its commitment to environmental stewardship, deserves. New Build Design in Upper Bucklebury needs to respond to the grain of the place — the modest scale of the existing houses, the woodland setting, the palette of brick and tile that has become the village's quiet signature. And for sites in the open countryside beyond the common, 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.
Upper Bucklebury is a place where the common shapes the character of every home around it — the light, the views, the sense of living within a landscape rather than merely beside it. If you are thinking about a project here, whether it is extending a family home, retrofitting an older house, or building something new, we would welcome the conversation.