Walk into All Saints Church in Crudwell and you can read six centuries of craft in two arcades standing a few metres apart. The north arcade, built in the late twelfth century, has circular piers and trumpet capitals — solid, confident Norman work. Turn to the south arcade, added in the early fourteenth century, and the piers are octagonal, the arches double-chamfered and pointed, the masons reaching for something lighter. Two approaches to the same structural problem, separated by perhaps a hundred and fifty years, standing side by side in a building that has absorbed them both without contradiction. That is what draws me to Crudwell as an architect: the village does not hide its layers. Older buildings west of the church are local limestone with stone-slated roofs, the Plough Inn dates from the later eighteenth century, Crudwell House arrived in the early nineteenth with an ashlar south front and a Doric porch that brought formal classical ambition to a village built on vernacular stone, and in the mid-nineteenth century a terrace of neo-Gothic cottages appeared on the east side. Each generation used the same material — the limestone that this edge-of-Cotswolds landscape provides — but shaped it to its own purpose. That is a tradition worth continuing.
Award-winning Architects in Crudwell
Experience That Counts in Crudwell
I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006, and we now work from Oxford with clients across the country. My membership of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings shapes everything we do in villages like Crudwell — SPAB's philosophy of conservative repair, of understanding what has lasted and why before proposing what comes next, runs through every project we take on in a conservation area. I am a RIBA Chartered and ARB Registered Architect, accredited by The Green Register and a member of the Passivhaus Trust, because making historic buildings comfortable and energy-efficient without damaging what makes them significant is the work I find most rewarding. Our Passivhaus home The Deerings won the RIBA East Award in 2018, the same year I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the Building Design Awards. Our work has been featured in Dezeen, The Modern House Journal and Grand Designs Magazine, and in 2025 I was invited to judge the British Homes Awards.
Designing for a Village That Shows Its Layers
Renovations in Crudwell begin with reading the building's own history, because almost every older property in the village has been altered at least once — and often the alterations tell you as much as the original fabric. The conservation area, designated in 1975 and focused on the oldest part of the village around All Saints Church, contains a concentration of listed buildings whose materials and construction techniques span several centuries. Wiltshire Council handles planning and listed building consent, and the Crudwell Neighbourhood Plan — made in 2021 with a design code that reinforces the importance of local vernacular character — adds a further layer of policy. We welcome that scrutiny. Understanding how a limestone rubble wall was bonded, where a stone-slated roof meets a later extension, or why a Victorian addition chose ashlar where the original used coursed rubble is not just academic — it determines what the building will accept and what it will resist. That is the starting point for any renovation we undertake here.
Many of the older stone buildings in Crudwell were built when thermal comfort meant a good fireplace and heavy curtains, and they can be cold, draughty and expensive to heat by modern standards. EnerPHit, the certified retrofit standard developed by the Passivhaus Institute, offers a disciplined route to transforming the energy performance of these buildings without compromising their character. The approach is fabric-first: careful internal insulation that respects the moisture behaviour of limestone walls, improved airtightness at junctions where heat loss is greatest, and mechanical ventilation with heat recovery to maintain air quality without opening windows to the winter. In a village where stone walls are the defining visual element — from the churchyard boundary to the rubble gables of cottages along The Street — the external appearance remains untouched while the interior becomes warmer, quieter and dramatically cheaper to run.
Extension Design in Crudwell demands sensitivity to proportion and material, because the village's buildings sit close together and any addition is immediately visible in the streetscape. An extension to a later eighteenth-century cottage near the Plough requires a different response than an addition to one of the grander early nineteenth-century properties along The Street — and the mid-nineteenth-century neo-Gothic cottages on the east side show that even the Victorians understood the importance of working within the local stone vocabulary. We design extensions that read as considered additions rather than afterthoughts, matching stone where appropriate, introducing contemporary elements where that serves the building better, and respecting the eaves lines and window proportions that give the streetscape its coherence.
Sustainable Design is the thread that connects all of this work. Crudwell's limestone vernacular — quarried locally for centuries, shaped into coursed rubble for cottages and dressed ashlar for grander houses like Crudwell House — offers a clear template: use what performs, what lasts, what belongs. PassivHaus Design takes this thinking to its most rigorous expression for new homes, achieving near-zero energy demand through fabric performance alone, and we have designed certified Passivhaus homes that prove high performance and architectural beauty are not in opposition. The challenge for new buildings in Crudwell depends on where they sit: within the conservation area, New Build Design must read as a contemporary response to the village's layered streetscape of Norman, Georgian and Victorian fabric; on the village edge, the Neighbourhood Plan's design code and the visual coherence of existing rooflines and stone proportions set the bounds. For sites in the open countryside beyond, Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework provides the only route — and the proximity of the Cotswolds National Landscape to the west raises the bar for any development seeking to justify its place in this landscape.
If you are considering a project in Crudwell — whether renovating one of the village's listed stone buildings, improving the energy performance of a home that has served the community for generations, or extending a property within the conservation area — we would welcome the conversation.