Step inside St Laurence in Appleton and look up at the nave arcade — four pointed arches resting on round pillars, Transitional Norman work dating to around 1180. What catches the eye is the capitals: every one carved differently. The masons who built this arcade were working within a shared structural language, column and arch repeated bay after bay, yet they gave each capital its own character. It is a small act of individuality within a larger discipline, and it says something fundamental about how the best architecture works. Next door stands Appleton Manor, dating from around 1190 to 1200 and described by Pevsner as "an amazing survival" — one of the oldest inhabited manor houses in England, its late twelfth-century walls still carrying the weight of a building that has been extended, altered, and loved for more than eight centuries. Appleton is a village where architecture endures not because it is preserved in amber but because each generation has found something worth keeping and something worth adding.
Award-winning Architects in Appleton
Why Appleton Trusts Gresford Architects
I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006. We are now based at the Oxford Eco Centre in Osney Mead, which felt right — a place that understands sustainable design as foundational, not ornamental. My training at the Mackintosh School in Glasgow taught me to read a place before you start drawing: the materials, the light, the way a building sits in its landscape. That habit shapes everything we do. We won the RIBA East Award for The Deerings, a Passivhaus home in Hertfordshire, and were shortlisted for a RIBA South Award for The Old Water Tower. I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year in 2018 and judged the British Homes Awards in 2025. We are members of SPAB because heritage conservation and performance design are not opposite ends of a spectrum — they are the same conversation. Phoebe, my wife, is a conservation architect, and when we work on older buildings like those in Appleton, her eye for what makes a building coherent, rather than merely compliant, changes how we design. Our work has been published in Dezeen, The Modern House Journal, and Grand Designs Magazine.
How We Work in Appleton
Appleton falls within the planning authority of the Vale of White Horse District Council. The village has a designated conservation area, and the parish of Appleton-with-Eaton is rich in listed buildings — from the Grade II* manor and church to the farmhouses, cottages, and garden walls that give the village its quiet, layered character. Any work within this setting is assessed for its impact on the wider conservation area, which means that design quality is not optional here. It is the starting point.
Renovations in Appleton often begin with buildings that carry centuries of alteration within their walls. The manor itself is a case study in this — twelfth-century origins, a sixteenth-century porch, a seventeenth-century extension, and Detmar Blow's thoughtful remodelling in 1924. Many of the village's smaller stone cottages and farmhouses have their own, quieter histories of adaptation. We approach these buildings as our SPAB membership demands: understanding the existing fabric before proposing any change, reading the structure for clues about how it was built and how it has been modified, and working with the grain of what is already there rather than imposing something new upon it. The goal is not to freeze a building in time but to give it a future that respects its past.
The stone cottages and farmhouses around Appleton — rubble-built, thick-walled, with single-glazed windows and damp patches where the pointing has failed — are beautiful partly because of their thermal mass, partly in spite of their thermal performance. Heat pours out through uninsulated walls and draughty junctions between old and newer fabric. EnerPHit, the Passivhaus Institute's retrofit standard, was designed for exactly this kind of building: too good to demolish, too cold to live in comfortably. It is rigorous without being destructive — you improve airtightness, add insulation behind the external stone so the conservation area character remains untouched, upgrade windows and ventilation. We have lived in a home designed to Passivhaus standards, and there is a quality to it that is hard to overstate: even temperature, genuine quiet, a sense that the building is working for you rather than asking you to work around it.
Extension Design in Appleton's conservation area is public work as much as private — it shapes the village as much as it shapes the house. The stone, the pitch of roofs, the way windows sit in their frames: these are the grammar of the place, and a good extension does not ignore that grammar and hope it goes unnoticed. It reads it, learns from it, and adds something that feels as though it belonged all along. That is harder than it sounds, but it is where the work becomes interesting — when the constraint produces the creative pressure that leads to better architecture. Not just more space, but better proportions, better light, a clearer relationship between inside and outside.
Sustainable Design and PassivHaus Design principles run through all our work — whether as a full certification pathway or a performance-led approach to insulation, glazing, orientation, and material selection. New Build Design opportunities in Appleton are rare, constrained by the conservation area, which is as it should be. But where they arise, on appropriate sites at the edges of the village, a new home should perform better than the old: more durable, more comfortable, more economical to run. The open countryside beyond Appleton, between the Thames to the south and the Corallian Ridge to the north, is the kind of landscape where Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework applies — enabling architecturally exceptional homes in rural locations where the quality of the design is itself the justification for building.
Those masons at St Laurence understood something that still holds: the best work comes from paying attention to every detail, even when the structure around it is familiar. If you are considering a project in Appleton, whether it is a sensitive renovation of an older property or something entirely new, we would welcome the conversation.