What strikes me about White Waltham is how comfortably the ancient and the unexpected sit together. The Church of St Mary, with its Norman arch still visible on the south side of the tower, stands opposite a fourteenth-century barn with a fine oak roof and weatherboarded walls — nine hundred years of building tradition concentrated in a few hundred metres. And then, just beyond the village, one of Europe's largest civilian grass airfields, where de Havilland opened a flying school in 1935 and the Air Transport Auxiliary made its wartime headquarters. A place that has absorbed layer after layer of history without losing its quiet, settled character is a place that understands something important about how buildings and landscapes grow together. At Gresford Architects, that kind of layering is at the heart of how we think about design.
Award-winning Architects in White Waltham
Why Homeowners in White Waltham Trust Gresford
I started 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, accredited by The Green Register, and a member of both the Passivhaus Trust and the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. That combination matters — it reflects a practice equally comfortable with high-performance energy design and the careful, sensitive work that older buildings demand. Our Passivhaus home The Deerings 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. In 2025 I was invited to judge the British Homes Awards. We bring the same depth of attention and enthusiasm to every project, whether it involves a listed cottage or a contemporary new build.
Designing for a Village Built in Layers
White Waltham's St Mary's Church and Bury Court conservation area places the historic heart of the village under careful stewardship, and rightly so. The flint and stone dressings of the church, the half-timbered houses near the churchyard, the thatched cottages along the lanes — these are buildings that have earned their place over centuries, and any work within or adjacent to the conservation area needs to respect that accumulated character. Renovations in this context are about understanding what a building already has and working with it, not against it. Solid walls, original timber windows, handmade clay tiles — these are materials with real quality, and the best approach is to upgrade performance while preserving the fabric that gives each building its identity. The Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead, as the local planning authority, takes the conservation area seriously, and we welcome that kind of rigorous oversight.
For the older homes in White Waltham — particularly those within the conservation area or the characterful properties around the cricket green — EnerPHit offers a rigorous, certified path to better energy performance without compromising what makes the building worth keeping. It is the retrofit standard we trust most, addressing insulation, airtightness and ventilation as an integrated system rather than a patchwork of individual measures. Working with the heavy flint walls and timber frames typical of this part of Berkshire demands a careful understanding of moisture movement and building physics. It is exacting work, and deeply satisfying — the marriage of careful conservation thinking with the kind of energy performance that genuinely changes how a home feels to live in.
Extension Design is equally relevant to homes in White Waltham, where many properties have the garden space and the proportions to grow. The best extensions here read the materials and rhythms of the existing building — the scale of a flint wall, the pitch of a tiled roof — and then add something that is unmistakably of its own time. Not a pastiche, but an honest new layer that improves how the home works and connects the interior with the landscape around it. Sustainable Design runs through every project we undertake, from the orientation and massing of a building to the specification of materials and the performance of the thermal envelope. PassivHaus Design takes this to its most demanding level, creating homes that maintain comfortable, stable temperatures with minimal mechanical heating — buildings that are kinder to the environment, more economical to run, and genuinely joyful to live in.
New Build Design in a village like White Waltham carries a particular responsibility. Any new home needs to sit within the existing grain of the settlement — its scale, its materials, its relationship to the landscape — while being unmistakably contemporary in its thinking and its performance. And in the open countryside beyond the village, where the parish stretches into farmland and the airfield occupies its broad sweep of grass, Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework provides a route for truly exceptional new homes — architecture that earns its place through the quality of its design and its sensitivity to the setting around it.
White Waltham is a village that has always known how to hold its layers together — Norman stone, medieval timber, Georgian brick, and the wide open runways where aviation pioneers took to the sky. If you are thinking about a project here — an extension, a renovation, a new home that belongs in this place — we would welcome the chance to talk it through.