What I notice first about Clanfield is the way water organises the village. The Clanfield Brook runs parallel to the main road, threading between Cotswold stone houses and garden walls, crossed by small stone bridges and shaded by weeping willows. An ancient causeway follows the brook between the Upper and Lower Village Greens — two generous open spaces that survived enclosure when so many others were lost. The village's long, narrow green opens at its southern end into a wide funnel that once led to common pasture, and the houses on its east side sit well back from the road, giving the whole settlement a spaciousness that feels deliberate rather than accidental. This is a village shaped by the logic of water and land, where the stream dictated the form and the buildings followed. It is the kind of place where architecture has always been a practical response to landscape, and that is something I find genuinely exciting to work with.
Award-winning Architects in Clanfield
An Oxford-based Practice with Deep Local Knowledge
I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006, and we are now based at the Oxford Eco Centre in Osney Mead — well placed for the villages and towns of West Oxfordshire where so much of our work takes place. I trained at the Mackintosh School of Architecture in Glasgow, where the emphasis was always on understanding a place before proposing anything for it. That training shaped everything we do. We won the RIBA East Award for The Deerings, a Passivhaus home in Hertfordshire, and were shortlisted for a RIBA South Award for The Old Water Tower. I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year in 2018 and judged the British Homes Awards in 2025. Our membership of SPAB — the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings — reflects a commitment to working with historic fabric rather than against it, and my wife Phoebe, a conservation architect, brings particular expertise to projects in villages like Clanfield where every building exists in conversation with its neighbours. Our work has been featured in Dezeen, The Modern House Journal, and Grand Designs Magazine — recognition of a practice that treats sustainability not as a constraint but as a creative opportunity.
How We Work with Homes in Clanfield
Clanfield sits within the planning authority of West Oxfordshire District Council. The village has a rich stock of listed buildings — Tudor House, dating from around 1600 with its prominent gables and cavetto-moulded mullion windows; Manor Farmhouse from the late seventeenth century; The Plough, a three-bay Cotswold stone house built around 1660. The building material throughout is limestone rubble, sometimes roughly coursed, sometimes uncoursed with alternating angle quoins, often under stone slate roofs. This consistency of material gives the village its visual coherence, and any new work here needs to understand that language before it can add to it.
Extension Design in Clanfield means reading the proportions that the village has established over four centuries. The depth of a window reveal in limestone, the pitch of a stone slate roof, the way a gable meets the sky — these are the details that make the village cohere, and an extension that belongs here learns from them. We approach this not as imitation but as fluency: understanding the grammar well enough to write a new sentence that sounds natural. The brook and the greens create a landscape setting that is unusually open for a village of this size, which means extensions are often visible from public spaces. That visibility is a constraint, but it is also an invitation to design something that contributes to the village rather than merely attaching itself to a house.
Renovations in Clanfield involve working with buildings that carry layers of alteration — seventeenth-century cores behind eighteenth-century fronts, stone walls that have been repointed and patched across generations. St Stephen's Church tells this story on a larger scale: a Norman tympanum over the south door, a Transitional arcade from around 1200, an early fourteenth-century tower, and a nave rebuilt by J. Luker in 1869. The village's domestic buildings carry similar layers, and renovating them well means reading those layers rather than flattening them. Our SPAB training insists on understanding what is there before deciding what to change — an approach that protects the character of these buildings while making them work for the way people live now.
Sustainable Design runs through everything we do, and in Clanfield there is a community that takes this seriously — One Planet Clanfield is an active local group working to reduce the village's environmental impact. We share that ambition. The older limestone houses here are beautiful but thermally inefficient, with solid walls that conduct heat and single-glazed windows that lose it. EnerPHit, the Passivhaus Institute's retrofit standard, offers a rigorous pathway to transform thermal performance while preserving the external character of these buildings — working from the inside with carefully detailed insulation, improved airtightness, and mechanical ventilation with heat recovery. PassivHaus Design principles inform our approach to all new work as well, whether as full certification or as a performance-led framework for reducing energy use through intelligent orientation, insulation, and glazing specification.
The open farmland around Clanfield — low-lying ground north of the Thames, with long views across gentle topography — is the kind of setting where New Build Design can respond to its surroundings rather than ignoring them. Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework enables architecturally exceptional homes in rural locations, where the quality of the design itself justifies building in the countryside. This is a landscape that deserves architecture of real ambition.
Clanfield has been shaped by the practical intelligence of people who understood their landscape — who followed the brook, kept the greens open, and built in the stone beneath their feet. We bring that same attention to every project: buildings designed to be comfortable, economical to run, and joyful to live in. If you are considering a project in Clanfield, we would welcome the conversation.