Walk down Church Street in Windsor and you are looking at houses that have stood since the late seventeenth century — red brick, timber, generous proportions — built not for royalty but for the people who lived and worked in the shadow of the Castle. That is what catches my eye about Windsor as an architect. The Castle is extraordinary, of course, but the real story of the town is written in the domestic buildings that grew up around it: the Georgian facades along Park Street with their Doric pilasters and tiled roofs, the narrow lanes climbing the hill, the way an entire town learned to hold its own beside a thousand years of royal architecture. Buildings like these were made by people who cared about proportion, materials and craft, and they repay that care by lasting. That is the kind of architecture I believe in.
Award-winning Architects in Windsor
Architecture That Earns Its Place Beside the Castle
I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006, driven by a conviction that sustainable buildings — homes that are comfortable, designed to last and to use energy and materials as efficiently as possible — are not a compromise but the highest form of the craft. We are RIBA chartered and ARB registered, and that commitment to heritage-sensitive, environmentally responsible design has shaped everything we have built since. Our Passivhaus home The Deerings won a RIBA East Award in 2018, and 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 that same year, and in 2025 was invited to judge the British Homes Awards. In a town like Windsor, where the built environment carries centuries of accumulated skill and intention, those credentials are not decorative — they are the foundation for work that does justice to what is already here.
Designing for a Town Shaped by the Castle and the Thames
Renovations in Windsor mean working with buildings that have seen several lifetimes of change. Windsor's town centre has been a designated conservation area since 1969, with the Inner Windsor Conservation Area drawn in its current form in 1990. It protects a townscape where seventeenth-century timber frames sit behind later brick facades, where Georgian proportions meet Victorian additions, and where every alteration tells a story about how the town has adapted around its royal centrepiece. My membership of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings reflects a conviction that understanding historic fabric is the starting point for any good intervention — not a constraint but a guide. When you strip back a rendered wall in Windsor and find the original brickwork beneath, that material is telling you what the building wants next. Listed building consent through the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead requires that kind of attentiveness, and we welcome it.
EnerPHit, the Passivhaus retrofit standard, speaks directly to Windsor's architectural character. The Georgian and Victorian townhouses that line Park Street and cluster beyond Peascod Street, the Edwardian villas on the roads towards the Great Park — these were built with skill and care, but designed when thermal performance was not a consideration. A well-proportioned Georgian facade or a Victorian bay window speaks a different language from modern energy standards, and most owners live with the consequences: cold rooms, persistent draughts, heating bills that feel excessive for houses built with such evident quality. EnerPHit bridges that gap. It works at the level of insulation, airtightness and ventilation — the hidden infrastructure of the building — leaving the red brick, the timber sashes and the tile roofs to speak for themselves. We bring the expertise of Passivhaus Trust membership and The Green Register to ensure the retrofit performs as precisely as the drawing predicts.
Extension Design is often the most practical way to gain space in Windsor's established streets, where the conservation area and the Metropolitan Green Belt together constrain what can be built and where. The entire Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead lies within the Green Belt, which means that even outside the conservation area the planning context rewards thoughtful, sensitive design over sheer ambition. We see that as an advantage. The best extensions in a town like Windsor are the ones that read the existing building — its materials, its rhythm, its relationship to the street — and add something that feels as though it was always intended. Within the conservation area, any proposal must demonstrate that it preserves or enhances the character of the place, and that discipline produces better architecture than a blank brief ever could.
Sustainable Design runs through every project we take on, and in Windsor it carries a particular weight. This is a town where buildings have endured for centuries because they were built well — with good materials, honest construction and an understanding of their setting beside the Thames and the Great Park. Designing sustainably here means continuing that tradition: homes that perform well thermally, that use materials responsibly, and that sit within their context with the same confidence as the Georgian and Victorian buildings they sit alongside. PassivHaus Design takes that principle to its highest technical standard, delivering homes with exceptional thermal comfort and air quality. New Build Design, where planning policy allows, gives us the opportunity to create something entirely new that nonetheless belongs — informed by the scale, the materials palette and the character of its surroundings.
Beyond the town itself, the countryside around Windsor — the Great Park, the Thames floodplain, the Green Belt farmland — presents opportunities for exceptional rural architecture. Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework provides the route to building a genuinely outstanding home in the open countryside, but the design must justify its place. With Windsor Great Park, a Grade I listed landscape of over two thousand hectares, as the backdrop, the bar is rightly high. We have the design ambition, the environmental credentials and the Passivhaus expertise to meet it.
Windsor is a town that has always demanded the best of its buildings. From the Castle to Church Street, from Park Street to the Thames, the standard is set by centuries of architecture that was built to last, to serve, and to reward the eye. If you are considering a renovation, an extension, or a new home in or around Windsor, we would welcome the conversation.