Aynho is known as the Apricot Village. Many of its houses carry espaliered apricot trees trained against their stone walls — a tradition that relies on the thermal behaviour of the masonry itself. Stone walls absorb heat during the day and release it slowly through the evening, creating the microclimate that allows a Mediterranean fruit to ripen in Northamptonshire. What interests me as an architect is the principle: the wall is not just a boundary but a climate. Good design has always worked this way — using the mass and orientation of a building to moderate the conditions around it. The Church of St Michael, Grade I listed, has a fourteenth-century Decorated Gothic tower whose body was demolished in 1723 and rebuilt by the local mason Edward Wing in a classical style intended to complement the adjacent Aynhoe Park. Georgian box pews and a west gallery survive inside. The village sits on the Oxfordshire border near Banbury.
Award-winning Architects in Aynho
Understanding How Walls Work
Working across the country from Oxford, we encounter every kind of wall — solid stone, timber frame, cavity brick, certified Passivhaus envelopes — and the first question is always the same: how does this wall behave? I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006. I am an ARB-registered and RIBA Chartered architect, a member of SPAB — the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings — the Passivhaus Trust and The Green Register. The Deerings, a certified Passivhaus home in Hertfordshire, won the RIBA East Award in 2018, the year I was also a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the Building Design Awards. In 2025 I was invited to judge the British Homes Awards. Our projects have been published in Dezeen, Grand Designs Magazine and The Modern House Journal.
Architectural Services Near Banbury
Extension Design in Aynho should respond to the village's exceptional architectural coherence — a settlement whose classical church, Georgian houses and espaliered walls create a consistency rare in English villages. The Cartwright family, who owned Aynhoe Park, shaped the village's character, and the relationship between the great house and the domestic buildings around it still defines the setting. Whether the brief is a ground-floor extension connecting the house to the garden, a garden room, or additional space above, the design should make the whole building feel more resolved while sitting comfortably within this refined fabric.
Sustainable Design connects every project we take on, and in Aynho the apricot trees demonstrate that the most elegant sustainable solutions are the ones that work with the building's own physics. PassivHaus Design sets our benchmark for new construction, delivering certified comfort with minimal energy demand. New Build Design in Aynho should respect the stone character and classical proportions of the village. For sites in the countryside around the parish, Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework provides a route to architecturally outstanding homes — but the design must demonstrate the quality that a Grade I listed village church and a planned estate village set as the local standard.
Renovations in Aynho engage with a building stock shaped by the Cartwright estate's long influence. The church itself — a medieval tower attached to a Georgian classical body — demonstrates that a confident new style can sit alongside older fabric when both are built with conviction. West Northamptonshire Council handles planning for the parish. Through my membership of SPAB, I approach these buildings with the understanding that solid stone walls manage moisture through their mass and their lime mortar — and that any renovation must work with that behaviour, rather than against it.
EnerPHit, the Passivhaus Institute's certified retrofit standard, addresses the thermal performance of older homes without compromising their character. The stone cottages in Aynho — whose walls already work hard enough to ripen apricots — present the familiar challenge of solid-walled construction in a domestic context: thick walls with no insulation, draughty junctions, and a building envelope that predates any concept of thermal efficiency. Vapour-open insulation, careful airtightness detailing, and mechanical ventilation with heat recovery can transform them — warmer, quieter, dramatically cheaper to run — while the stone facades continue to support their fruit trees as they always have.
Aynho's walls ripen apricots because the stone holds the day's warmth into the evening. If you are considering a project here, we would welcome the conversation.