There is a moment, walking down Burford's High Street for the first time, when the gradient takes hold and the whole town reveals itself — limestone facades stepping down toward the Windrush, each building a slightly different shade of honey and grey, each roofline shifting to follow the slope. It is one of those places where you understand immediately that the architecture is not just on the landscape but of it, shaped by the same oolitic limestone that lies beneath the streets and rises in the walls. What draws me to Burford as an architect is the depth of that relationship. The Tolsey, raised on its stone pillars halfway down the hill, has watched over this street since the 1520s, when wool merchants gathered beneath its open ground floor to do business. The Church of St John the Baptist at the foot of the slope carries Norman origins from the 1170s through to its Perpendicular nave, rebuilt with the confidence that the wool trade brought. And it was George Edmund Street's restoration of that church in the 1870s — heavy-handed by today's standards — that helped provoke William Morris into founding the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. As a SPAB member myself, I find that connection irresistible: Burford's architecture has been teaching people how to care for old buildings for over a century.
Award-winning Architects in Burford
A Practice Built on Conservation and Sustainable Ambition
I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006, and we are now based at the Oxford Eco Centre in Osney Mead — well placed to work across the Cotswolds and the wider region. As a RIBA Chartered and ARB-registered architect, I bring the professional standards that heritage work demands, but what defines our practice is a conviction that sustainability and sensitive design are the same thing, not competing priorities. Our EnerPHit retrofit of The Old Orchard in Oxfordshire, featured in The Modern House Journal, showed what careful thermal improvement can achieve without erasing a building's history. The Deerings in Hertfordshire, a Passivhaus new build that won the RIBA East Award in 2018, demonstrated the same rigour applied to contemporary design. I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the Building Design Awards in 2018 and served as a judge for the British Homes Awards in 2025. My wife Phoebe is a conservation architect, and her influence has sharpened the way I read older structures — understanding where intervention strengthens a building and where restraint is the better answer. In a town like Burford, where so many buildings carry centuries of adaptation within their walls, that instinct matters.
Architecture Shaped by Stone and Slope
Renovations in Burford often involve buildings that have already been altered several times across their lives — medieval cores behind Georgian facades, seventeenth-century ranges extended in the Victorian period, twentieth-century interventions that sometimes respected the original and sometimes did not. The town's conservation area places clear expectations on any new work — reading those layers honestly is the starting point. As a SPAB member, I approach older buildings with the understanding that each generation's contribution has value, and that the best renovations reveal what is already there rather than imposing something new. The thick Cotswold stone walls that give these houses their character, with their palette running from warm honey to pale grey depending on the quarry source, also present a thermal challenge — solid masonry loses heat steadily — and the question is how to improve comfort without compromising the fabric. Getting the material right is not a cosmetic choice but a matter of belonging.
EnerPHit, the Passivhaus Institute's retrofit standard, offers a rigorous answer. Rather than insulating indiscriminately, it requires understanding exactly where Burford's thick Cotswold stone loses heat, where moisture moves, and intervening with surgical precision so that the building performs better without trapping damp behind new materials. For the older properties along Burford's lanes, this kind of evidence-based retrofit can transform energy performance while keeping what makes these houses worth preserving.
Sustainable Design underpins everything we do, and in a place like Burford — where the built fabric reaches back a thousand years and the landscape is protected as the Cotswolds National Landscape — it takes on particular meaning. A home that heats efficiently, that doesn't lose warmth through its medieval stone walls, that uses materials chosen to outlast us just as the honey-coloured stone around us has outlasted centuries of owners: these choices are kinder to the planet, yes, but they also mean being warmer in winter, cheaper to run, more joyful to live in.
Extension Design for homes in Burford requires the same sensitivity to material and proportion — extensions must work with the existing building, respecting the stone palette and the roofline rhythm that defines the town, and demonstrating that they preserve and enhance both the built character and the wider setting. PassivHaus Design offers a framework for New Build Design on sites within or around Burford that achieves exceptional thermal performance while sitting honestly in a Cotswold setting. And for those considering sites in the countryside beyond the town, Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework provides a route for truly exceptional rural homes where design quality must justify the location.
Burford is a place where architecture and landscape have been in conversation for nearly a thousand years — from the Norman crossing tower of St John's to the wool merchants' Tolsey to the limestone cottages that line every lane. If you are considering a renovation, an extension or a new home here, we would welcome the chance to talk about what thoughtful, sustainable architecture can bring to this extraordinary town.