When Cumnor Place was demolished in 1810, the Earl of Abingdon had its stone carted to Wytham to rebuild a church. A medieval manor house, built for the abbots of Abingdon during the reign of Edward III, taken apart and reassembled as something entirely new. I find that story compelling — not for the loss, but for the principle it reveals about material and continuity. Stone does not expire. It moves, it finds new purpose, it carries the marks of one building into the next. Walking through Cumnor today, that same limestone rubble runs through the village like a thread: in the low boundary walls along the High Street, in the older cottages with their ashlar dressings, in the twelfth-century tower of St Michael's Church standing on the hilltop where the manor house once stood beside it. This is a place whose building story stretches back to the Saxon charter of 931, and the material itself — quarried, laid, repaired, reused — has been part of that story the whole way through.
Award-winning Architects in Cumnor
Trusted by Clients Across Oxfordshire
Gresford Architects was founded in London in 2006, and we now work from the Eco Centre in Osney Mead, Oxford. We are RIBA Chartered and ARB Registered, members of both the Passivhaus Trust and the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, and accredited on The Green Register. Our project The Deerings — a certified Passivhaus in Hertfordshire — won a RIBA East Award, and The Old Water Tower was shortlisted for RIBA South Awards. I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the 2018 Building Design Awards, featured in Grand Designs Magazine for our Passivhaus work, and served as a judge at the 2025 British Homes Awards. My wife Phoebe is a conservation architect, and her influence has deepened my understanding of how historic buildings breathe, settle and endure — something that matters enormously when working within a conservation area like Cumnor's, where the grain of the village has been accumulating for over a thousand years.
Designing for a Village Shaped by Stone
Cumnor falls under the Vale of White Horse District Council for planning, and its conservation area — first designated in 1969 and extended in 1990 to include the Appleton Road area around the village pond — guides what can be built and how. The character of the village core is defined by its limestone construction, its intimate scale, and the way buildings sit along the High Street with long garden plots running to the rear. Any new work here must understand that rhythm.
Renovations are where we begin for many of the older properties in Cumnor. Limestone rubble walls, timber-framed upper storeys, roughcast render over ancient structures — these buildings were made with materials that behave in specific ways, and interventions that ignore those patterns do more harm than good. We approach each project with the care that membership of SPAB demands: understanding the building first, then working with its logic rather than against it. EnerPHit, the certified retrofit standard developed from Passivhaus principles, offers a route to dramatically improved thermal comfort and energy efficiency in older buildings without compromising the breathability and character that make them worth keeping. For the limestone cottages and farmhouses that define Cumnor's lanes, it is a way of bringing a building into the twenty-first century while respecting the centuries that came before.
Extension Design in Cumnor requires close attention to the conservation area's character — the proportions of existing rooflines, the materials palette of local stone and slate, the relationship between buildings and the green spaces that separate them. Sustainable Design runs through every project we take on, from the orientation of glazing to the specification of insulation and ventilation systems, because buildings that use less energy and last longer are better buildings. PassivHaus Design and New Build Design offer the chance to build something genuinely of this era — comfortable, efficient, designed to last — on the sites that do come forward in and around the village. Our Passivhaus project The Deerings showed that certified energy performance and real architectural character are not in competition. For the countryside beyond Cumnor, Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework allows architecturally outstanding homes where the design enhances the immediate setting — a demanding standard, but one that the rolling landscape west of Oxford can reward.
The stone that was carried from Cumnor Place to Wytham still stands. Good material, honestly used, endures. We would welcome the chance to talk about what your building in Cumnor could become — whether that means restoring what is already there, extending it thoughtfully, or creating something entirely new.