The name tells you everything about this place. A winterbourne is a stream that flows only when the chalk aquifer beneath it is full — rising in the wet months, retreating in the dry, shaping the valley not by force but by rhythm. The River Bourne runs through Winterbourne Gunner on precisely that pattern, and the buildings along its course have always responded to it. Walk through the village and you see cob walls built from the chalk and clay the stream exposed, flint gathered from the fields above, thatch cut from the water margins. Peacock Cottages, a pair of fifteenth-century dwellings with cruck frames beneath their thatched roof, are a Grade II* listed reminder that people have been building with these materials here for over five hundred years. The village carries the name of Gunnora, wife of Henry de la Mare, who held the manor in the thirteenth century — one of only two parishes in Wiltshire named after a woman.
Award-winning Architects in Winterbourne Gunner
An Architect's Practice Built on Care and Craft
Gresford Architects is a RIBA Chartered and ARB Registered practice, founded in London in 2006 and now based in Oxford. I trained at the Mackintosh School of Architecture in Glasgow, where I developed a keen sense of craftsmanship and an enthusiasm for exploring surfaces, joints, textures and light — instincts that have shaped everything we do in villages like Winterbourne Gunner, where the quiet, enduring beauty of historic materials demands the highest standard of care. We are members of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, the Passivhaus Trust and The Green Register, and we bring particular expertise to the conservation and retrofit of listed buildings. The Deerings, our Passivhaus home in Hertfordshire, won the RIBA East Award in 2018, and our projects have been published in Dezeen, Grand Designs Magazine and The Modern House Journal. In 2025 I was invited to judge the British Homes Awards — a recognition of the depth of experience we have built over almost twenty years working with heritage landscapes and the villages that define them.
Architectural Services for the Bourne Valley
Renovations are at the heart of what this village needs. Winterbourne Gunner's building stock spans centuries — from the cruck-framed cob and flint of Peacock Cottages to the brick and slate of the early nineteenth-century Mill, and on through to the twentieth-century homes that filled in the gaps along the A338. The Grade I listed Church of St Mary the Virgin, with its twelfth-century origins and whitewashed tower, anchors the older fabric of the village, while Manor Farmhouse and Box Cottage add further layers of historic character. Working with buildings of this age and variety demands an understanding of historic construction — how cob breathes, how flint walls move, how timber frames settle over time. As members of SPAB, we approach every renovation with the principle that old buildings should be repaired honestly, their materials respected rather than concealed, their character revealed rather than erased.
EnerPHit, the Passivhaus Institute's retrofit standard, offers a way to bring these older homes into the twenty-first century without losing what makes them worth keeping. A cob-walled cottage in the Bourne Valley loses heat differently from a cavity-wall semi — the insulation strategy, the vapour management, the ventilation design all need to be specific to the building. EnerPHit provides the framework for that specificity: careful insulation, improved airtightness, and mechanical ventilation with heat recovery, all calibrated to the existing fabric. The result is a home that is warmer, quieter, and dramatically less expensive to heat, while the cob walls and thatched roof that give it character remain intact. For the later homes along the main road, the same standard applies but the approach shifts, with upgraded glazing and airtightness improvements that can transform thermal performance.
Extension Design in a village like Winterbourne Gunner requires sensitivity to what is already there. The older properties sit on plots that have been shaped by centuries of use, and an extension to a listed or historic building must work with the existing proportions, materials and rooflines rather than against them. Wiltshire Council is the planning authority for the village, and proposals affecting listed buildings or their settings will need listed building consent as well as planning permission. For the later twentieth-century homes, an extension offers the chance to rethink how the house connects to its setting — opening living spaces towards the valley, drawing in the light that the chalk landscape reflects so well, and creating rooms that feel part of the Bourne Valley rather than simply placed upon it.
Sustainability is not a trend in Winterbourne Gunner — it is the only sensible way to care for buildings that have already stood for five hundred years. Whether the project is a renovation of a cob-walled cottage that predates the industrial age, or an extension to a twentieth-century home along the A338, the principle is the same: improve comfort, reduce energy demand, and do no damage to what makes the building worth keeping. Sustainable Design, for us, means homes that are comfortable to inhabit, economical to run and built to last. PassivHaus Design takes that principle to its highest standard, delivering homes with exceptional thermal comfort and minimal energy demand. New Build Design in the Bourne Valley, where it is permitted, can draw on the local palette of flint, chalk and timber to create something that sits naturally within the landscape while meeting the most demanding modern performance targets. For exceptional rural sites in the wider Wiltshire countryside, Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework provides a route to a new dwelling of truly outstanding design.
If you are considering a project in Winterbourne Gunner — whether bringing an older home gently into the present, extending to make the most of this valley setting, or building something new in the Wiltshire landscape — we would welcome the conversation.