The Wintles

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. So after an interesting planning process and over several years we built phases one and two at The Wintles in Shropshire.

The Wintles was our second development. We bought the land in 1998 partly as a reaction to the planning application for a run-of-the-mill estate on the site that was being considered at the time.

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’. 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 several development partners to build more places that have the same sense of place and conviviality as The Wintles.