Most Oxfordshire villages anchor themselves around a medieval church — a building that has gathered centuries of use and meaning, stone by stone, generation by generation. Aston's church is different. St James was built in 1838 and consecrated in 1839, a chapel of ease designed to serve a community that had depended on Bampton for its spiritual and civic life for the better part of a millennium. The name itself — East Tun, the settlement east of Bampton — tells you how long Aston defined itself in relation to its neighbour. What interests me architecturally is what happened after that dependency loosened. A village that waited centuries for its own church then built one in a single purposeful act, with a low squat tower and a single bell, and in doing so declared that it had arrived on its own terms. That confidence, that willingness to build something new while remaining rooted in a particular place, is at the heart of what we do at Gresford Architects.
Award-winning Architects in Aston
Sustainable Architecture Rooted in Heritage
Aston's conservation area, with its eleven listed buildings, is a record of quiet, purposeful building — farmhouses and cottages that adapted over generations, each change serving a practical need without erasing what came before. That kind of patient, accumulative craft is something I understand instinctively. My wife Phoebe is a conservation architect, and through her work I have come to see how buildings hold the memory of every hand that shaped them, every decision about where a wall should stand or a window should open. It is a way of thinking that shaped our practice from the start. I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006, and we are now based at the Oxford Eco Centre — an ARB-registered, RIBA Chartered practice with membership of SPAB, the Passivhaus Trust and The Green Register. Our project The Deerings, a Passivhaus home in Hertfordshire, won a RIBA East Award in 2018. That same year I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the Building Design Awards, and in 2025 I served as a judge for the British Homes Awards. What connects all of this work is a conviction that the most sustainable buildings are often the ones that take the most care — over materials, over context, over the way a home sits within its place.
How We Work with the Built Character of Aston
Aston sits about four miles south of Witney and just over a mile north of the Thames, within West Oxfordshire District Council's planning area. The village was historically a township of Bampton — it does not appear independently in the Domesday survey of 1086 — and that long administrative relationship shaped its built form. The settlement grew along the High Street and around the junctions of Back Lane and North Street, with the conservation area protecting the historic core and its eleven Grade II listed buildings. The local vernacular is limestone rubble, as you would expect in this part of the Great Oolite belt, with brick also appearing in later buildings, adding a warmer note to the village's material palette.
Renovations in Aston require a careful reading of that material history. The listed buildings here are modest in scale — farmhouses, cottages, a thatched dwelling — but they carry the evidence of centuries of adaptation within their walls. Working with these buildings means understanding which elements are original, which were added later, and where sensitive improvements can be introduced without compromising what makes them worth keeping. We approach every renovation with the discipline of SPAB training: understand the building's history, identify what matters most, and intervene with respect and restraint. Where the fabric is sound, we leave it alone. Where it needs help, we use materials and techniques that sit honestly alongside what already exists.
Extension Design in Aston works within the grain of a village that has grown incrementally for centuries. Many of the older properties along the High Street and Back Lane were built for agricultural households with different needs from the families who live in them today. An extension should feel like a natural continuation of that process of adaptation — responding to the proportions and materials of the existing building while giving a household the space, light and connection to the garden that contemporary life asks for. In the conservation area, this means working closely with West Oxfordshire's conservation officers to ensure that new additions enhance rather than diminish the character of the streetscape.
EnerPHit, the Passivhaus Institute's certified retrofit standard, offers a rigorous approach to transforming the energy performance of older homes in Aston. Limestone rubble walls can be thermally challenging — the stone itself conducts heat readily, and the mortar joints in older construction can be a significant source of draughts. EnerPHit addresses these issues through careful insulation, improved airtightness and mechanical ventilation with heat recovery, bringing comfort and efficiency into the twenty-first century while leaving the external character of the building intact. For homes in the conservation area, where external appearance matters to the village as a whole, this inside-out approach is particularly valuable.
Sustainable Design underpins every project we undertake, whether it involves an existing building or a new one. In a village like Aston, sustainability connects naturally to the vernacular tradition — local stone, simple forms, buildings that were designed to last rather than impress. PassivHaus Design takes that principle further, creating homes that are not only kinder to the planet but genuinely more comfortable to live in, more economical to run, and more joyful to inhabit. New Build Design in the countryside around Aston must respond to the landscape as carefully as to the village itself — the flat Thames-side farmland to the south, the gentler rises toward Witney to the north. Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework provides a route for truly exceptional new homes in the open countryside, where design quality and landscape sensitivity are the essential tests.
Aston is a village that found its own voice — slowly, over centuries, and then quite deliberately when it built St James in 1838. If you are considering a project here, whether extending a family home, renovating a listed cottage, or designing something new that belongs to this particular place, we would welcome the conversation.