In 1931, Sir Arthur Evans had a mound built on Boars Hill — not to commemorate anything, but to see Oxford again. The trees and walls that new residents had planted across the hilltop in the preceding decades had gradually swallowed the very prospect that had drawn people there in the first place. Evans's solution was characteristically direct: raise the ground itself until the view of the dreaming spires reappeared. I think about Jarn Mound often, because it captures something essential about the relationship between architecture and landscape. A building's connection to its setting is not a given — it has to be designed for, maintained, sometimes fought for. That tension between shelter and openness, between privacy and prospect, is what makes Boars Hill one of the most architecturally interesting places near Oxford, and it is the kind of challenge we relish at Gresford Architects.
Award-winning Architects in Boars Hill
Why Homeowners in Boars Hill Trust Gresford Architects
I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006, and we now work from the Oxford Eco Centre on Osney Mead. Boars Hill is a place I know well — its wooded lanes, the way light filters differently through each season, the sense that you are in deep countryside while the city sits just beyond the trees. That duality demands architects who understand both landscape sensitivity and the rigour of Green Belt planning. We are RIBA Chartered and ARB registered, members of the Passivhaus Trust and accredited by The Green Register, because we believe that environmental performance and design quality are the same conversation. Our project The Deerings in Hertfordshire — a Passivhaus home — 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. Our work has been published in Dezeen, The Modern House Journal and Grand Designs Magazine. In 2025, I judged the British Homes Awards, assessing the very standard of residential design that we hold ourselves to here.
Designing for the Green Belt at Boars Hill
The housing stock on Boars Hill is distinctive, and planning constraints shape every project here. The settlement sits firmly within the Oxford Green Belt, a designation that requires every proposal to demonstrate it does not cause greater harm to the openness of the Green Belt than what already exists. This is not a constraint that favours timidity — it favours precision: architects who can demonstrate exactly how a proposal respects its context, enhances the landscape, and delivers genuine architectural quality within a tightly controlled framework. Late Victorian and Edwardian villas sit alongside interwar houses and a scattering of mid-century properties, many set within generous, heavily planted grounds. These are substantial homes, but many were built to standards of insulation and airtightness that leave their occupants cold in winter and reliant on ageing heating systems. Extension Design here is often about rethinking how a large house meets its garden — opening living spaces to the south, bringing natural light deeper into plans that were designed for a different era of domestic life, while respecting the mature tree canopy and the secluded character that defines the hill.
Sustainable Design at Boars Hill means working with the landscape rather than against it. The Oxford Preservation Trust owns nearly two hundred acres of the hill, including Jarn Mound, Matthew Arnold Field and woodland that frames the settlement. Any project here must sit within that wider ecological and visual context. We design with passive solar orientation, natural ventilation, durable low-embodied-energy materials and fabric-first principles, because in a setting this sensitive, a building that performs well environmentally is also one that earns its place.
Renovations on the hill often involve houses from the early twentieth century — solid buildings with good bones but poor thermal performance. EnerPHit, the Passivhaus Institute's certified retrofit standard, offers a rigorous route to transforming these homes: careful insulation, improved airtightness, mechanical ventilation with heat recovery. The result is a house that feels entirely different to inhabit — warmer, quieter, more comfortable — while its external appearance remains unchanged. For homes in Boars Hill, where the relationship between building and garden is everything, that invisibility matters.
PassivHaus Design delivers the same comfort from new, with superinsulation, triple glazing and heating demands a fraction of conventional construction. New Build Design within the Green Belt is challenging but not impossible where a replacement dwelling or an infill site can be shown to maintain openness. Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework provides a further route for genuinely exceptional residential architecture in rural settings — homes whose design quality and landscape sensitivity are themselves the justification for permission.
Matthew Arnold walked this hill and found in it the setting for two of his finest poems. Robert Bridges built his house here in 1907, and John Masefield followed — two successive Poets Laureate, drawn by the same quality of quiet elevation, close to the city but apart from it. That quality still defines Boars Hill, and it is worth protecting through architecture that matches it. If you are considering a project here, we would welcome the conversation.