What strikes me about Whitley is how much of the village arrived at once. The name means a white clearing in a wood, and for centuries that is more or less what it was — open ground on the road between Atworth and Lacock. Then, in the late seventeenth century, something shifted. Tenant farmers began building in rubblestone, and they built well: Whitley Farmhouse with its three Cotswold-type gables and ovolo mullioned windows, Slade's Farmhouse arriving in the same decades, with Westlands and Northey's Farmhouse following a generation later in the early eighteenth century. The Pear Tree Inn went up in the same period, its blocked three-light mullioned windows still visible on the left return, its interior fitted out a century later with chamfered beams and good joinery. Walk through Upper, Middle and Lower Whitley today and you can read that building boom in the stone — the same rubblestone walls, the same stone slate roofs with their saddleback copings and kneelers. It is a village that found its character in a single generation, and that character has held firm ever since.
Award-winning Architects in Whitley
An Architectural Practice Built on Craft and Sustainability
I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006, and we are now based in Oxford, working with clients across the country on homes where careful design, material honesty and energy performance come together. I am a RIBA Chartered and ARB Registered 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 for a village like Whitley, where rubblestone farmhouses and twentieth-century infill sit side by side. Our project The Deerings, a certified Passivhaus in Hertfordshire, won the RIBA East Award in 2018, while The Old Water Tower was shortlisted for the RIBA South Awards. I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the Building Design Awards and served as a judge for the British Homes Awards in 2025. Our work has been featured in Dezeen, The Modern House Journal and Grand Designs Magazine. What unites every project is a conviction that sustainability is not a constraint but a way to create homes that are more comfortable, more economical to run and more rewarding to inhabit.
Designing for a Rubblestone Village Near Melksham
Extension Design in Whitley begins with the stone. The listed farmhouses along the village — Whitley Farmhouse, Whitley House, the Pear Tree Inn — were all built from local rubblestone under stone slate roofs, and their proportions are modest even where the houses themselves are substantial. Adding to a building like this means understanding how it was put together: the thickness of the rubblestone walls, the depth of the window reveals, the way the gables sit against the roofline with their saddleback copings and kneelers. An extension in render or brick would jar against centuries of consistent material language. We design extensions that continue the conversation — matching the stone where the building demands it, or introducing a carefully detailed contemporary element where a contrast reads honestly.
New Build Design is a live question in Whitley. The Joint Melksham Neighbourhood Plan identifies Shaw and Whitley as a Large Village with a housing allocation of seventy-three new homes to be delivered by 2038, and outline planning has been submitted for a development at land off Corsham Road. Any home built here must sit within a village whose proportions were set by late seventeenth-century rubblestone farmhouses — buildings with modest gable ends, deep window reveals, and the consistent stone slate roofline with saddleback copings that runs through Upper, Middle and Lower Whitley. Wiltshire Council will expect new development to respect not just the idea of place but the specific material language that defines this village. We approach new builds not as replicas of what already stands but as contemporary architecture that belongs to the same tradition — the same honest material palette, the same relationship to the lane, the same commitment to building well. Sustainable Design principles ensure every new home is comfortable, efficient and made to last, genuinely adding to the village rather than merely filling space within it.
Renovations in Whitley often mean working with buildings that have been altered over three centuries. The Pear Tree Inn is a good example — late seventeenth-century rubblestone walls with a nineteenth-century interior, later additions to the rear, Roman tile roofing on the outshut. Stripping a building like this back to a single period would destroy what makes it interesting. The skill is in understanding which changes have earned their place and which obscure the building's logic. My membership of SPAB informs that approach: we work with a building's history rather than against it, repairing lime mortars with lime, respecting the way rubblestone walls manage moisture, and ensuring that new intervention is legible as belonging to our own time.
EnerPHit offers a structured retrofit pathway for older homes in Whitley where thermal performance falls well short of modern expectations. Rubblestone walls are poor insulators, and the stone slate roofs that define the village were never designed with airtightness in mind. EnerPHit work here requires internal insulation detailed to avoid trapping moisture within the rubblestone, mechanical ventilation with heat recovery, and careful attention to junctions around the deep mullioned window openings of the village's older buildings. For new construction, PassivHaus Design takes comfort and efficiency to the highest certifiable standard, virtually eliminating the need for conventional heating. Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework provides a route for outstanding individual homes in the countryside beyond the village boundary. Sustainable Design is the thread that connects every service we offer, from the material choices in a farmhouse renovation to the energy strategy of a new home on Corsham Road.
If you are considering a project in Whitley — whether extending a rubblestone farmhouse, building a new home that belongs within the village, or bringing an older building up to modern standards of comfort and performance — we would welcome a conversation.