Ascott-under-Wychwood is really two villages that became one. Ascott Earl to the west, Ascott d'Oyley to the east — each with its own medieval manor, its own castle mound, its own logic of settlement along the Evenlode valley. Walk through the village today and you can still sense that duality in the layout, in the way lanes gather around the triangular green with its tall chestnut tree, and in the quiet authority of Manor Farm where thirteenth-century buttresses from the old d'Oyley castle survive within a building that has been adapted and inhabited for centuries since. That kind of layering — where each generation absorbs what came before rather than erasing it — is the essence of good architecture. It is the quality that draws me, as an architect, to villages like Ascott-under-Wychwood, and the principle that guides how we work at Gresford Architects.
Award-winning Architects in Ascott-under-Wychwood
Conservation and Sustainable Design in the Evenlode Valley
I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006, and we now work from the Oxford Eco Centre on Osney Mead — well placed for the villages of the Evenlode valley and the wider Cotswolds. We are members of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, which has shaped how we approach older structures: carefully, respectfully, with an understanding that buildings teach you something if you listen. Our membership of the Passivhaus Trust and The Green Register reflects the other half of what we do — designing buildings that are comfortable, economical to run and as light on the planet as possible. Our work on The Deerings in Hertfordshire, a certified Passivhaus that won a RIBA East Award in 2018, showed that energy performance and architectural generosity are not in conflict. The Great Barn in Buckinghamshire, a Grade II listed restoration, taught us how to read a building's accumulated history before proposing a single change. I was shortlisted for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the 2018 Building Design Awards, and our projects have been featured in Dezeen, The Modern House Journal and Grand Designs Magazine.
Architectural Services for Homes in Ascott-under-Wychwood
Renovations in Ascott-under-Wychwood mean working with Cotswold limestone — a material that ages beautifully but demands understanding. The parish council designated a Neighbourhood Area in 2023, a sign that the community is thinking carefully about how the village develops. The coursed rubble walls, stone-slate roofs and mullioned windows here have a consistency that gives the village much of its character. Holy Trinity Church, built around 1200 in a transitional style between Norman and Early English, is Grade II* listed and remains a reference point for the quality of stonework in the valley. Listed farmhouses, seventeenth-century barns with dovecotes in their gable ends, and a granary standing on staddle stones all form part of a fabric that repays attention. Lime mortars, stone-slate detailing, the way rubble walls manage moisture — these are not cosmetic questions but structural ones. Buildings like Manor Farm, with its medieval buttresses beneath later additions, show how well this material endures when it is treated on its own terms. We approach every renovation by reading the building first: its construction, its thermal behaviour, the logic of its original design.
EnerPHit, the Passivhaus Institute's certified retrofit standard, offers a disciplined route to transforming the thermal performance of older homes in Ascott-under-Wychwood without compromising their character. Internal insulation, airtightness detailing and mechanical ventilation with heat recovery can make a stone cottage genuinely warm and efficient while preserving the external appearance that matters to the village as a whole. The difference in comfort and running costs is substantial — and it is achieved by working with the building, not against it.
Extension Design in Ascott-under-Wychwood means respecting the particular character of this village — the coursed rubble walls, the modest proportions, the way buildings settle into the Evenlode valley floor. In a settlement this compact, a poorly proportioned addition is immediately visible, and the right approach draws on the language of what already exists: the scale of the mullioned windows, the depth of the stone walls, the rooflines that do not speak louder than they need to. Sustainable Design principles run through every project we take on, from passive solar orientation and natural ventilation to the selection of materials with low embodied energy and long service lives.
For sites in the Evenlode valley and the open countryside beyond the village, PassivHaus Design sets the standard for New Build Design — superinsulation, triple glazing and airtight construction that delivers heating demands a fraction of those in a conventional house. Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework provides a route for genuinely exceptional architecture in rural settings, where design quality and sensitivity to the landscape are the criteria for approval.
Ascott-under-Wychwood has been shaped by centuries of careful, incremental building — from the Norman masons who raised Holy Trinity to the farmers who adapted their stone houses generation after generation. If you are considering a project here, whether improving an older home, extending a cottage or exploring new architecture in the surrounding landscape, we would welcome the conversation.