Beneath the polygonal apse of All Saints, Wing, there is a stone-vaulted crypt that dates to the eighth century — older than the apse above it, older than the nave, older than almost anything else you will find in an English parish church. Three round-headed niches are set into its walls, their stonework plain and deliberate, and the space itself is low, cool and quiet. What strikes me about this crypt is not just its age but its purpose: it was built to support what came after. The ninth-century apse sits on it, the fourteenth-century south aisle grew beside it, the fifteenth-century tower rose at the west end, and through all of that expansion the crypt simply carried on doing its job. The best architecture has always worked this way — the most important structure is often the part you never see.
Award-winning Architects in Wing
An Award-Winning Practice for a Remarkable Village
Gresford Architects is an ARB registered and RIBA Chartered practice, founded in London in 2006 and now based in Oxford, working with clients across the country. Our work on The Deerings — a Passivhaus home in Hertfordshire — won a RIBA East Award in 2018, and The Old Water Tower was shortlisted for the RIBA South Awards in 2016. That same year I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the Building Design Awards, and in 2025 I served as a judge at the British Homes Awards. We are members of the Passivhaus Trust and The Green Register, accreditations that reflect the rigour of our approach to energy performance. My membership of SPAB — the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings — is particularly relevant in a village like Wing, where the built heritage stretches back over a thousand years and every intervention needs to be guided by an understanding of what is already there.
Architectural Services for Homes in Wing
Renovations sit at the heart of what we do in places like Wing. The village contains a rich mix of listed buildings spanning over twelve centuries — from the Rothschild-era estate houses that reflect the influence of nearby Ascott House to the older cottages and farmhouses that define the village's core along the High Street. The Dormer monuments inside All Saints, with their decorated sarcophagi and gilded heraldic effigies still protected by original iron railings, are a reminder that people in Wing have always invested care in their buildings. The conservation area, centred on All Saints Church and extending towards Mentmore and Ascott within the Green Belt, carries that same expectation: any intervention must respond to what centuries of building have produced. Working with historic fabric means reading what previous generations did, understanding where lime mortars are needed, where earlier structures sit within later additions, and where a light touch will achieve more than wholesale change.
EnerPHit is our certified retrofit approach for existing buildings, and it is especially valuable in a village where much of the housing stock was built long before thermal performance was a consideration. An EnerPHit project upgrades insulation, seals the building envelope and introduces mechanical ventilation with heat recovery, delivering stable indoor temperatures and significantly lower energy bills. In Wing's conservation area, where the character of traditional frontages matters, this work is typically internal-first — the street continues to see the building it has always known, while the home behind it performs to a measurably higher standard.
Extension Design is important where Green Belt and conservation area constraints limit outward growth and families need to make the most of the homes they already have. We design extensions that bring light deeper into existing plans, open living spaces to gardens, and use materials that sit naturally alongside the existing building — whether that is brick, render or the local stone that appears throughout Wing's older properties. The aim is always an extension that feels as though it belongs, not one that competes with what came before.
Sustainable Design runs through everything we do, from the orientation of a building and the sourcing of its materials to the long-term performance of the finished home. PassivHaus Design takes this to its most rigorous conclusion, creating homes with exceptionally low energy demand through careful attention to airtightness, insulation and the elimination of thermal bridges. For those looking beyond the village, New Build Design offers the opportunity to start from first principles, and Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework provides a route for truly exceptional homes in rural settings — architecture whose quality earns its place in open countryside.
If you are renovating a listed building in Wing, extending a family home within the conservation area, or considering a new home in the surrounding countryside, we would be glad to talk. The crypt beneath All Saints has supported everything that grew above it for over twelve hundred years. The principle holds: good architecture begins with what you cannot see — the thought, the care, the structure that makes everything else possible.