What I find compelling about Urchfont is the way the village refuses to be read in a single material. Walk the lanes around the green and you move from greensand rubble walls to Flemish-bond brickwork to timber-framed cottages with colour-washed render and thatch — each building declaring its period through what it is made of. The church of St Michael and All Angels, with its chancel vaulting that Pevsner compared to the aisles of Bristol Cathedral, is built from the local stone. Urchfont Manor, just a few hundred metres away, announced a different era entirely when Sir William Pynsent rebuilt it in the late seventeenth century using brick with stone quoins and dressings — a material choice that Pevsner considered among the finest of its type in Wiltshire. That layering of traditions, each generation building with the materials and methods of its own time, is precisely the kind of place where architecture becomes a conversation across centuries.
Award-winning Architects in Urchfont
An Award-Winning Practice Working Across the Country
Gresford Architects was founded in London in 2006 and is now based in Oxford, working with clients throughout Wiltshire and across the country. I am an ARB-registered and RIBA-chartered architect, and my membership of SPAB, the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, reflects our approach to heritage: studying how buildings perform over time, learning from their construction, and intervening with care rather than assumption. We won the RIBA East Award for The Deerings, a certified Passivhaus home in Hertfordshire, and I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the 2018 Building Design Awards. Our projects have been featured in Dezeen, The Modern House Journal and Grand Designs Magazine, and I served as a judge for the British Homes Awards in 2025. As members of the Passivhaus Trust and accredited by The Green Register, we bring the same rigour to a listed cottage renovation as to a new home in the open countryside.
Architectural Services for Homes in Urchfont
Extension Design in Urchfont requires a considered response to the particular building you are extending. A greensand cottage with a thatched roof asks for something quite different from an eighteenth-century brick house or a later stone-and-slate property — and in a conservation village where these types sit side by side, the wrong material choice stands out immediately. Wiltshire Council, as the local planning authority, will expect any extension within the Urchfont conservation area to respect the character of the existing building and the streetscape around it. We approach extensions by first understanding the construction logic of the original — wall thickness, roof pitch, window proportions, the way materials meet at junctions — and then designing an addition that either continues that logic or sets up a deliberate, respectful contrast. Church Farm, west of St Michael's, dates from the sixteenth century with cruck-truss framing in the original hall range — extending a building with that kind of structural history means working with what the original builders did, not against it.
Renovations in a village with Urchfont's depth of listed buildings — from the Grade I church and Grade II* manor to the manor farmhouse with its sixteenth and seventeenth-century fabric and dozens of Grade II cottages — demand patience and knowledge in equal measure. The timber-framed and colour-washed cottages with brick nogging that line parts of the village are beautiful but require specific expertise: understanding how breathable construction works, how lime renders differ from modern cement, how timber frame movement affects the elements within it. We bring that understanding from our own heritage projects, including The Great Barn in Buckinghamshire, a Grade II listed barn restoration where the building's history had to be read carefully before any intervention could begin.
EnerPHit, the Passivhaus Institute's certified retrofit standard, offers a disciplined route to improving thermal comfort and reducing energy consumption in older homes in Urchfont — but it must be applied with sensitivity to how these buildings were made. The greensand rubble walls, the lime-pointed joints, the breathable thatch roofs — these are not just aesthetic features but a moisture management system that has worked for centuries. Sealing them with modern insulation without understanding the consequences risks condensation, damp and damage to the very fabric you are trying to protect. We design EnerPHit retrofits that respect the building physics of traditional construction, improving airtightness where the building can accept it while allowing walls and roof to continue breathing as they were designed to do.
Sustainable Design is the thread that connects everything we do at Gresford Architects. It is not an add-on or a marketing label — it is how I believe buildings should be made: comfortable, designed to last, and engineered to use energy and materials as efficiently as possible. In a village where the oldest buildings were constructed from stone dug within walking distance and timber felled from local woodland, that principle already has deep roots. PassivHaus Design takes sustainability to its most rigorous conclusion for new construction, delivering homes that require almost no conventional heating — homes that are warmer, quieter and more comfortable than anything built to standard regulations.
New Build Design on suitable plots near Urchfont, at the edge of the Vale of Pewsey where the greensand gives way to the chalk scarp of Salisbury Plain, offers the chance to create homes that respond to this transitional landscape. Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework provides a route for truly outstanding residential design in the wider Wiltshire countryside, where the quality of architecture must be exceptional enough to justify development beyond settlement boundaries — and where the geological variety of Urchfont's setting, from clay through greensand to chalk, provides a rich palette of conditions to design within.
If you are considering a project in Urchfont — whether extending a cottage, renovating a listed home, or exploring what a new house might become in this part of Wiltshire — we would welcome a conversation about how to begin.