What strikes me about Ebrington is how quietly it holds itself together. There is no single landmark that announces the village — no market square, no grand civic gesture. Instead, you walk along narrow lanes lined with Cotswold stone cottages, many still thatched, and you realise the beauty of the place is cumulative. Each house follows the same material logic: honey-coloured limestone from the Jurassic beds beneath the hills, pitched roofs, modest proportions. The discipline has held for centuries, from the coursed rubble walls of Ebrington Manor — home to the Fortescue family since 1476 — to the cottages that line the lanes below. As an architect, I find that kind of consistency more compelling than any grand statement. It tells you everything about what matters here: proportion, honesty of material, and a deep respect for the ground the buildings stand on. That is the standard we bring to every project at Gresford Architects.
Award-winning Architects in Ebrington
Why Clients Across the Country Trust Gresford Architects
I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006, and we now work from Oxford with clients across the country. Our approach has always been the same: buildings should be comfortable, designed to last, and use energy and materials as efficiently as possible. We are RIBA chartered and ARB registered, members of the Passivhaus Trust and the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, and accredited by The Green Register. That combination of sustainability expertise and heritage understanding runs through everything we do. Our Passivhaus home The Deerings won the RIBA East Award in 2018, our work on The Great Barn in Buckinghamshire demonstrated how a Grade II listed building can be brought back to life with care, and I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the Building Design Awards. Whether the challenge is a new build or a sensitive renovation, we bring the same conviction: understand the place, respect what is already there, and design with honesty.
How We Work with Homes in Ebrington
Renovations in Ebrington require an architect who can read what older buildings are telling you. The village sits within a conservation area designated in 1981, and its building stock spans centuries — from the Grade I listed Church of St Eadburgha, with its Norman nave and a tower dating from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, to the seventeenth-century cottages that make up much of the village today. Ebrington Manor itself is a lesson in how buildings accumulate: a fourteenth-century core, substantially reworked in the seventeenth century with coursed, roughly squared limestone under grey slate roofs. As a SPAB member, I approach these buildings by understanding how moisture moves through solid stone walls, where later interventions may have created problems, and what sympathetic change can achieve. Cotswold District Council manages planning for Ebrington, and any work within the conservation area demands careful negotiation between what a building needs thermally and what it must retain architecturally.
EnerPHit, the Passivhaus Institute's certified retrofit standard, offers a disciplined framework for improving the thermal performance of older homes in Ebrington without compromising their character. Many of the stone-walled cottages here lose heat through solid walls and draughty windows, and EnerPHit provides a measurable route to better comfort and lower energy bills. Our retrofit of The Old Orchard in Oxfordshire, featured in The Modern House, demonstrated this approach in practice — a building transformed in its energy performance while retaining the qualities that made it worth keeping. For the thatched and stone-built properties that define Ebrington's lanes, careful internal wall insulation, improved airtightness and considered window upgrades can make a real difference to how the house feels and performs through a Cotswold winter.
Extension Design is often the most practical way for families in Ebrington to gain the space they need. The challenge in a conservation area is designing an extension that respects the proportions and materials of the existing cottage while bringing something genuinely useful — light, connection to the garden, a kitchen that works for how people actually live. We design extensions that sit comfortably alongside the original building rather than competing with it, using local limestone and pitched rooflines where the setting calls for it.
Sustainable Design runs through every project we take on, whether a renovation or something new. In a village where the vernacular building tradition already demonstrates an instinct for using what is local and available, sustainability is not a departure — it is a return to first principles. New Build Design in the Cotswolds National Landscape faces particular scrutiny, but there are opportunities for homes that meet the highest environmental standards while respecting the character of the area. PassivHaus Design delivers homes that stay comfortable year-round with minimal energy input through superinsulation, airtightness, and mechanical ventilation with heat recovery. For exceptional rural sites in the countryside around Ebrington, Paragraph 84 provides a planning route where the quality of the architecture itself justifies development beyond the settlement boundary.
If you are considering a project in Ebrington — whether it is bringing an older cottage into a more comfortable future, extending your home to suit how your family lives now, or building something new that belongs in this landscape — we would be glad to talk. The best architecture here has always been quiet, honest and rooted in its materials, and that is exactly how we work.