Beneath Manor Farm House in Chesterton lies a twelfth-century barrel-vaulted undercroft — one of perhaps twenty Norman domestic undercrofts still surviving anywhere in England. The walls are immensely thick, the arched doorway partly blocked, the deeply splayed window a reminder that this space was built when glass was a luxury and light had to be coaxed through stone. From the lane you would never know it was there. The house above has been remodelled across centuries, its sixteenth-century timber frame absorbed into eighteenth-century alterations, and yet that Norman chamber endures beneath it all, quiet and intact. It is a powerful example of how the most important architecture in a village is often the least visible — hidden behind later facades, buried beneath accumulated layers of change. That idea of reading a building carefully, of understanding what lies beneath the surface before proposing anything new, is central to everything we do at Gresford Architects.
Award-winning Architects in Chesterton
An Architect's Commitment to Chesterton's Built Heritage
Gresford Architects was founded in London in 2006 and is now based at the Oxford Eco Centre. I am an ARB-registered and RIBA Chartered architect, a member of SPAB — the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings — and that membership shapes how we approach every historic building. SPAB teaches you to look before you act, to understand how a structure has changed over time before deciding what it needs next. In a village like Chesterton, where the church of St Mary carries a twelfth-century arcade beneath a thirteenth-century rebuilding and a fourteenth-century tower, that discipline matters. My wife Phoebe is a conservation architect, and through her work I have developed a deep respect for the way buildings accumulate meaning over time — each generation's contribution legible if you know where to look. Our project The Deerings, a Passivhaus home in Hertfordshire, 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. We are accredited on The Green Register and members of the Passivhaus Trust, bringing the same rigour to energy performance that we apply to heritage sensitivity.
How We Work with Homes in Chesterton
Chesterton sits on Gagle Brook, a mile and a half southwest of Bicester, within Cherwell District Council's planning area. The village name carries Saxon roots — recorded in the Domesday Book under Miles Crispin — though the land itself hints at older origins, Chesterton typically denoting a settlement near a Roman fort. Walk through the village and you read the layers without trying: St Mary's church, Grade II* listed, where a twelfth-century arcade sits beneath a thirteenth-century rebuild and a fourteenth-century tower. The Grade II* listed Manor Farm House with that remarkable undercroft beneath. The Red Cow, a pub from the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Chesterton Lodge, built in 1889 as an Italianate house for Henry Tubb, a Bicester banker — a confident Victorian gesture in a village that had been quietly accumulating stone and timber for seven centuries before it arrived.
Renovations in Chesterton begin with that kind of close reading. Manor Farm House itself tells the story — a Norman undercroft absorbed into a Tudor structure, remodelled in the Georgian period, each layer serving a purpose that made sense at the time. Working with buildings like this means understanding which interventions can be reversed and which cannot, where thermal improvements can be introduced without compromising historic fabric, and how to make a home more comfortable and more efficient while respecting the evidence of earlier hands. We bring the same careful approach to every renovation, whether it involves a listed farmhouse or a later cottage where the accumulated changes are less dramatic but no less important to understand.
Bicester's growth is pressing toward Chesterton — recent planning applications for new housing near the village are a sign of what is coming. New Build Design here carries a particular responsibility: new homes must respond to the village's own material language, its stone, its modest scale, the way older buildings sit without fuss in their plots, rather than importing a suburban vocabulary from elsewhere. Sustainable Design underpins every new build we undertake, reducing energy demand through a fabric-first approach that starts with orientation, insulation and airtightness before reaching for technology. PassivHaus Design takes this further — homes that are kinder to the planet, more comfortable to inhabit, more economical to run and genuinely more joyful to live in.
EnerPHit, the Passivhaus Institute's certified retrofit standard, offers a structured path to transforming the thermal performance of older homes in Chesterton without altering their external character. Through careful insulation, improved airtightness and mechanical ventilation with heat recovery, EnerPHit brings a building's energy performance into the twenty-first century while the street-facing facade remains untouched. For a village where the relationship between buildings and their setting matters — where rooflines, window proportions and the rhythm of openings along a lane all contribute to the character of the place — this approach is particularly well suited.
Many homes in Chesterton's later phases — the mid-twentieth-century infill along some of the lanes — were designed for smaller households and tighter expectations of space. Extension Design here asks a different question of each house: where does the light come from, how does the building meet its garden, what does the family actually need from this home now? For properties close to the historic core, within sight of Grade II* buildings and the older stone fabric, the reading becomes more careful still — understanding the materials, the proportions, the rhythm of openings along the lane before proposing anything new. Extensions should feel inevitable, not added. Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework provides a route for exceptional homes in the open countryside surrounding the village, where design quality and landscape enhancement are the essential tests.
Chesterton is a village with more architectural depth than a glance from the lane might suggest — a Norman undercroft beneath a remodelled farmhouse, a church carrying eight centuries of change, a landscape under growing pressure to accommodate new homes. If you are considering a project here, whether renovating a historic building, extending a family home, or designing something new that earns its place beside what already stands, we would welcome the conversation.