Atworth sits on what was once the main turnpike road from London to Bath, and you can see the influence of that route in the stone. Walk along Bath Road and you pass ashlar facades, limestone tile roofs, buildings that carry the same material confidence as the grander terraces a few miles west. The White Hart, trading as a coaching inn before 1771, still presents its fine ashlar front and mansard roof to the road — a building that served travellers and their horses, and was built to impress them. Then there is Cottles House, designed in the 1770s by Thomas Jelly and John Palmer of Bath in a striking Georgian gothick style, with pointed windows, a battlemented parapet and an octagonal chimney that could only belong to this part of Wiltshire. For a village of its size, Atworth has an architectural ambition that speaks directly to its position on that old road and its proximity to the Bath stone quarries. For an architect, the quality of stone here is not just a material fact — it shapes how you think about every intervention, every extension, every new wall that must sit beside three centuries of careful masonry.
Award-winning Architects in Atworth
Heritage-Sensitive Architects for a Bath Stone Village
Gresford Architects was founded in London in 2006 and is now based in Oxford, working with clients across the country. I am an ARB-registered and RIBA-chartered architect, a member of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings and accredited on The Green Register. We won the RIBA East Award for The Deerings, a certified Passivhaus in Hertfordshire, and our restoration of The Great Barn in Buckinghamshire — a Grade II listed barn — required exactly the kind of material sensitivity that working with Bath stone demands. I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the 2018 Building Design Awards and served as a judge for the British Homes Awards in 2025. These credentials matter in a village like Atworth, where sixty-nine listed buildings create a conservation area that asks a great deal of anyone proposing change.
Architectural Services for Homes in Atworth
Renovations in Atworth mean understanding how Bath stone behaves — how it weathers, how it breathes, where moisture moves through solid ashlar walls. The village holds buildings that span from the fifteenth-century Poplar Farm on Bradford Road, through the seventeenth-century coaching inns and farmhouses, to the Georgian refinement of Cottles House and the rebuilt nave of St Michael and All Angels, completed in 1832 by H.E. Goodridge of Bath. Each generation built in the same stone but with different ambitions, and a renovation must read that history before it adds to it. My membership of SPAB grounds our approach: understand the building as a whole system before proposing any change. Wiltshire Council, as the local planning authority, expects proposals within Atworth's conservation area to demonstrate exactly this kind of care, and we welcome the rigour it demands.
EnerPHit retrofit is one of the most valuable things we can offer homeowners in Atworth. Solid stone walls — whether rubblestone farmhouses or dressed ashlar — were never designed for thermal performance, and the older homes in the village can be uncomfortable and expensive to heat. The Passivhaus Institute's EnerPHit standard provides a route to genuine thermal comfort without compromising the stone character that gives Atworth its identity. Carefully detailed internal insulation, improved airtightness, and mechanical ventilation with heat recovery transform how a house feels to live in while keeping the external envelope untouched. Our EnerPHit retrofit of The Old Orchard in Oxfordshire, featured in The Modern House Journal, demonstrated what this approach can achieve in a stone-built home.
Extension Design in a village built of Bath stone carries a particular responsibility. The material palette is not optional — limestone, ashlar, tile — and any addition must respond to the scale and rhythm of what exists. But responding to context does not mean pastiche. A well-designed extension can be clearly contemporary while speaking the same material language as the original building, and the contrast between old and new, handled with confidence, often produces the most satisfying results. Where a property sits outside the conservation area, there is more freedom, but the discipline of working with good stone is its own reward.
Sustainable Design runs through everything we do. In a village where the building tradition is rooted in local stone — quarried nearby, shaped by hand, built to last centuries — sustainability is not a new idea. It is an old one, and our work carries it forward with modern precision. For new homes in Atworth, PassivHaus Design delivers superinsulation, controlled airtightness and mechanical ventilation with heat recovery — the most rigorous standard of energy performance available. We proved this at The Deerings and have lived in a Passivhaus ourselves. New Build Design in the open countryside beyond the village, where the landscape is still agricultural, may engage Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework — a route for homes of truly outstanding architectural quality that justify their position in the landscape. It is a demanding brief, and exactly the kind we relish.
If you are considering a project in Atworth — whether restoring a stone farmhouse, extending a home within the conservation area, or building something new that earns its place in this quietly ambitious village — we would be glad to hear from you.