Most Cotswold villages gather around a centre — a green, a crossroads, a church. Chedworth does something different. It follows the valley of a tributary of the River Coln, stretching for almost two miles along the contours of the land, its stone buildings scattered among trees and hedgerows rather than marshalled into a single core. The landscape has been shaping this village for a long time. Romans recognised what this sheltered valley offered and built one of the grandest villas in Britain on the slopes above, and medieval builders followed suit, raising the Church of St Andrew from local limestone in the twelfth century. What draws me to Chedworth as an architect is that dialogue between buildings and landscape — the way every generation has responded to the valley's particular character rather than imposing a plan upon it. Working here means understanding that relationship and continuing it.
Award-winning Architects in Chedworth
Sustainable Architecture Grounded in Experience
I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006, and we now work with clients across the country from our studio in Oxford. We are RIBA chartered and ARB registered, members of the Passivhaus Trust and The Green Register, and I am a member of SPAB — the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. That SPAB training matters in a conservation area like Chedworth, where working with medieval and seventeenth-century stone buildings demands an understanding of historic fabric well beyond standard practice. Our work is built around making homes more comfortable, more economical to run, and more joyful to live in — principles that guided The Deerings, a certified Passivhaus in Hertfordshire that won the RIBA East Award in 2018, and our EnerPHit retrofit at The Old Orchard in Oxfordshire, featured in The Modern House and The Spaces. I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the 2018 Building Design Awards and in 2025 served as a judge at the British Homes Awards. Our projects have appeared in Dezeen and Grand Designs Magazine. That breadth — from the Grade II listed Great Barn restoration in Buckinghamshire to certified Passivhaus new builds — is what we bring to a village like Chedworth, where heritage and performance must be pursued together.
How We Work with Homes in Chedworth
A renovation in Chedworth is always a conversation with the past. The village was designated a conservation area in 1977, and its listed buildings span centuries of construction — from The Manor, a former farmhouse with possible medieval origins whose present form dates mainly from the seventeenth century, to Peach Tree Cottage, a late seventeenth-century house built in thinly-bedded roughly squared and dressed Cotswold limestone under a stone slate roof. The Grade I listed Church of St Andrew, with its Norman origins, battlemented nave, and stone pulpit, anchors the village architecturally and sets the standard for how this stone has been worked over almost nine hundred years. Each building carries its own logic of material and construction, and renovation means uncovering that logic before proposing change. Cotswold District Council handles planning for Chedworth, and listed building consent in the conservation area requires heritage statements that demonstrate understanding of significance. Our approach — careful survey, honest specification, and detailed heritage impact assessment — is designed to satisfy both the building and the planning authority.
EnerPHit, the Passivhaus Institute's certified retrofit standard, applies building physics to the particular challenge of solid stone walls. Chedworth's limestone cottages are beautiful but often expensive to heat, and their walls must be allowed to breathe — moisture movement through stone is not a problem to be solved but a process to be respected. An EnerPHit retrofit here means improving thermal performance without trapping moisture, specifying insulation that works with the existing structure rather than against it, and achieving the airtightness that modern comfort demands while respecting the building's original logic. The approach requires discipline: careful analysis of where heat is lost through those roughly squared limestone walls, rigorous specification, and measured data to prove the work has succeeded. In a conservation area, that rigour is also the route to consent. Sustainable Design underpins this work — sustainability is not a constraint but an opportunity to reduce energy demand through intelligent design, to specify materials that age well alongside the Cotswold stone they sit within, and to create homes that are comfortable, designed to last, and use energy as efficiently as possible.
Extension Design in the Chedworth conservation area and Cotswolds National Landscape demands sensitivity to both the immediate building and the wider valley setting. The best extensions here sit honestly alongside the original — contemporary in spirit but respectful in scale, using materials that relate to the local limestone tradition without pastiche. Because the village follows the valley rather than clustering around a centre, views shift constantly, and a new addition must work from the lanes and bridleways that thread through the settlement as much as from the garden. Cotswold District Council and the Cotswolds National Landscape both influence what gets built, and a design that demonstrates genuine understanding of the setting is the surest route through planning. For sites in the countryside beyond Chedworth's conservation area, Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework permits exceptional new homes where design quality justifies a departure from normal restrictions — a policy that recognises this landscape's long history of architectural ambition, from the Roman villa in the valley to the medieval church on the hill above. PassivHaus Design and New Build Design both offer routes to creating homes that perform at the highest levels of comfort and efficiency — whether a certified Passivhaus new build or a family home designed to sit within this landscape as naturally as the buildings already here.
If you are considering a project in Chedworth — whether bringing a limestone cottage back to its best, extending a home within one of England's most valued landscapes, or building something new that continues this valley's long conversation between architecture and place — we would welcome the chance to talk.