What I find compelling about Amberley is how directly the landscape becomes the architecture. The village sits on the western escarpment of the Cotswolds above the Stroud valleys, and the oolitic limestone that forms the ridge beneath your feet is the same stone that was quarried and coursed into the walls around you — golden when freshly cut, weathering over the centuries to a quieter honey that seems to absorb the light rather than reflect it. Amberley Court, built around 1640 for a prosperous clothier and now Grade II listed, is a fine example of that tradition: Cotswold stone rubble shaped by the wealth of the wool trade, extended in the early nineteenth century but still rooted in the same material vocabulary. Then there is Holy Trinity Church, consecrated in 1836 to designs by the Cheltenham architect Robert Stokes, its Gothic exterior giving way to a remarkable cast iron internal structure — columns and floor framing in iron, an industrial material threaded through a traditional shell, funded by David Ricardo of Gatcombe Park. That meeting of old instincts and new thinking is something that resonates with how we work at Gresford Architects, and it is what makes designing for a place like this so rewarding.
Award-winning Architects in Amberley
Trusted Architects for Homes in the Cotswolds
Gresford Architects was founded in London in 2006, and we now work with clients across the country from our studio in Oxford. I am a RIBA chartered and ARB registered architect, a member of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, and accredited with The Green Register — credentials that together reflect our belief that good architecture is as much about understanding what already exists as it is about imagining what comes next. Our Passivhaus home The Deerings, in Hertfordshire, won the RIBA East Award in 2018, and in the same year I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the Building Design Awards. Our projects have been featured in Dezeen, The Modern House Journal, and Grand Designs Magazine. For homes in Amberley, where the Cotswold stone palette and the setting within the Cotswolds National Landscape demand care and conviction in equal measure, that depth of experience matters.
Designing for the Escarpment and the Stone
Extension Design in Amberley calls for a close reading of what is already there. The material palette is specific — oolitic limestone, stone slate roofs, lime render on some of the older cottages — and any addition that breaks from that vocabulary will feel like an intrusion rather than a conversation. Stroud District Council, the planning authority for Amberley, expects proposals within the Cotswolds National Landscape to demonstrate sensitivity to the area's character, and rightly so. We approach these briefs with enthusiasm, finding ways to bring light and space into Cotswold stone homes without competing with what makes them distinctive. An extension that works here is one that draws from the same proportions, the same weight of material, and the same relationship between solid wall and modest opening that the original builders understood instinctively.
EnerPHit, the Passivhaus Institute's standard for retrofit, addresses a reality that anyone living in a stone-walled cottage in Amberley knows well: these buildings are beautiful, solid, and often deeply cold in winter. The oolitic limestone that gives the village its character is a poor insulator, and many older homes lose heat through walls, floors, and single-glazed windows at a rate their occupants have simply learned to accept. EnerPHit works with the existing fabric rather than against it — careful insulation strategies, airtight detailing at junctions, upgraded windows that respect original proportions, and mechanical ventilation with heat recovery to manage moisture and maintain air quality. Our EnerPHit work on The Old Orchard in Oxfordshire, a timber-clad retrofit featured in The Modern House and The Spaces, demonstrates how much comfort and efficiency can be gained without sacrificing the qualities that make a building worth keeping.
Sustainable Design runs through every project we take on, but in a Cotswold village where the building tradition was born from the ground beneath it, sustainability feels less like an imported idea and more like a return to first principles. The clothiers and weavers who built in Amberley used local stone because it was what the landscape provided — durable, available, honest. We bring the same logic to contemporary projects: reducing energy demand, specifying materials with care, designing for longevity rather than fashion. PassivHaus Design takes this thinking to its most rigorous expression, creating homes that need almost no conventional heating — a standard that rewards precision with comfort, economy, and a lightness of environmental footprint that the original quarrymen of the Cotswold escarpment would have understood in their own terms.
Renovations for homes in Amberley often involve navigating the meeting point between the village's cloth-trade past and the domestic present. Properties like Amberley Court began life as something grander than a family home, and adapting those spaces — their proportions, their circulation, their relationship to the landscape — requires an architect who listens to the building before proposing change. My membership of SPAB informs how we approach these projects, reading the layers of alteration and addition that every old building accumulates, and working with them rather than stripping them away. For those looking beyond the village itself, New Build Design in the surrounding countryside must respond to the open, elevated character of the scarp edge and the commons, while Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework offers a route for genuinely outstanding new homes in rural settings — a demanding pathway, but one that rewards architectural ambition and sensitivity to place.
Amberley is a place where the stone beneath the ground and the walls above it are one and the same. If you are considering a project here, we would welcome the chance to talk.