We thought the best way of proving that it is possible to design a new village with the ambience and attractiveness of a well loved place was to build it. We were very clear that we didn’t want to create a pastiche of an old village which would be a pointless exercise. We wanted to build a contemporary village with a very human feel to it.

The Wintles was our second development and thanks to previous projects we knew exactly what we wanted to see in this development from the beginning; both in terms of the layout and the individual properties.

Here we could implement our design process.

The structure for the design brief was provided by Christopher Alexander’s ‘A Pattern Language’ and the new neighbourhood began to take shape, first on paper and later in reality. Soon we had our own design office and were managing the development and build processes directly. We used very different methods from traditional architectural design; ones that made the most sense to us.

People have been living on phases one and two for over ten years and tell us they love it. We are now working with our development partners to build more places that have the same sense of place and conviviality as The Wintles. More