What strikes me about Combe is that the village is as much about what you see between the buildings as the buildings themselves. The settlement sits on the edge of the Blenheim Palace estate, gathered loosely around a large green where The Cock Inn has looked out over open ground since the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century, and the spaces between clusters of cottages and farmhouses allow the Oxfordshire countryside — mature trees, hedgerows, long views towards the Evenlode valley — to reach right into the heart of the village. It is a dispersed, breathing kind of place, and that openness is what gives Combe its particular character. Inside the Grade I listed church of St Laurence, rebuilt in 1395 for Eynsham Abbey, fifteenth-century wall paintings — an Annunciation, a Crucifixion, a figure of St Christopher shown with fish and an otter — lay hidden beneath limewash for centuries before their rediscovery in 1892. Buildings in Combe have always carried more than first meets the eye.
Award-winning Architects in Combe
Why Homeowners in Combe Trust Gresford Architects
I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006 and we now work from the Eco Centre at Osney Mead in Oxford, well placed to serve the villages and towns of West Oxfordshire. I am ARB Registered and RIBA Chartered, and as a member of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings I bring a particular care for the kind of historic fabric that defines Combe's conservation area. Our Passivhaus project The Deerings, in Hertfordshire, won a RIBA East Award in 2018, and the same year I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the Building Design Awards. We are members of the Passivhaus Trust and accredited on The Green Register, and our work has featured in Dezeen, Grand Designs Magazine and The Modern House Journal. In 2025 I served as a judge at the British Homes Awards. My wife Phoebe is a conservation architect, and her deep understanding of historic buildings has shaped how we approach every project where old and new must coexist — something that matters in a village with thirty-seven listed buildings.
Architectural Services Shaped by Combe's Character
Planning in Combe falls under West Oxfordshire District Council, and the village lies within the Cotswolds National Landscape — the former Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. The conservation area at its centre protects a dispersed settlement of Cotswold stone cottages, former farmhouses and a handful of larger properties, while the Blenheim estate's long stewardship has shaped building patterns here for generations. Any architectural work in Combe needs to understand this layered context: the local stone, the open setting, and the relationship between built form and the landscape that runs through it.
Renovations in Combe call for an understanding of how these buildings have accumulated over time. The workers' cottages and farmhouses that form the village core were built in traditional local materials — Cotswold limestone, with brick introduced in the nineteenth century for buildings such as the parish reading room, made from clay dug at the Bolton's Lane brickworks. Many carry centuries of quiet alteration. As a SPAB member, I approach renovation as a process of reading what is already there before deciding what to change, working with the existing structure rather than against it, using compatible materials and honest repair. The fourteenth-century table tombs in St Laurence's churchyard — among the rarest surviving exterior tombs of their age in England — are a reminder that the most enduring things here were built with patience and care.
EnerPHit, the Passivhaus Institute's certified retrofit standard, offers a rigorous route to transforming the thermal performance of the Cotswold stone cottages and farmhouses that make up much of Combe's housing stock. These are buildings whose thick rubble walls hold cold through winter and whose small windows and uninsulated roofs were never designed for modern expectations of comfort. Continuous insulation, careful airtightness detailing and mechanical ventilation with heat recovery can dramatically reduce energy demand while improving air quality and quietness — important in a conservation area where external alterations are constrained and the most effective improvements must happen within the existing envelope. It is the kind of deep, measurable upgrade that produces homes warmer, healthier and far less expensive to run.
Extension Design within the conservation area and the Cotswolds National Landscape requires particular sensitivity to scale, materials and the open, permeable character that makes Combe distinctive. The spaces and views between buildings are a valued feature of the village, and an extension that blocks a sightline or overwhelms its neighbours does damage that goes beyond the individual property. We work closely with planning and conservation officers at West Oxfordshire to ensure proposals respond to the specific proportions and material palette of their immediate context.
Sustainable Design runs through everything we do, and in a landscape shaped by the Cotswolds National Landscape designation it takes on added weight — working with local stone, minimising waste, and ensuring new work sits as lightly in its setting as the village itself does within the Blenheim estate. PassivHaus Design achieves exceptional indoor air quality and near-zero heating demand, and is entirely achievable within the modest proportions and familiar forms of a village like Combe. New Build Design on any infill site here means studying the dispersed settlement pattern, the Cotswold stone palette and the varied rooflines of neighbouring buildings, ensuring that what we add respects the open, breathing character that gives the village its identity. Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework provides a route to architecturally outstanding homes in the open countryside beyond the village — a demanding standard that requires genuine design excellence and sensitivity to the Evenlode valley landscape, and one we relish.
From the Domesday mill on the Evenlode to the wall paintings quietly waiting beneath the limewash of St Laurence, Combe is a village that rewards careful looking. If you are considering a project here, we would welcome the conversation.