The twenty-eight medieval stained glass windows in St Mary's Church tell you something important about Fairford before you notice anything else: this is a place where people understood that light is a building material. John Tame rebuilt that church in the 1490s with the wealth of the wool trade, and his son Edward commissioned Barnard Flower, glazier to Henry VII, to fill every window with coloured glass between 1500 and 1517. Five centuries on, the glass survives complete, and it still teaches the same lesson. Architecture is not just walls and rooflines. It is how light enters a room, how a building meets the ground, how stone and water and sky work together. Walking through Fairford along the River Coln, where Cotswold stone cottages line the banks and the water moves quietly under old bridges, you feel that relationship between the built and the natural everywhere. It is a good place to think about what a building owes to its setting.
Award-winning Architects in Fairford
Why Trust Gresford Architects in Fairford
I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006; we are now based in Oxford, working with clients across the country. I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the Building Design Awards in 2018 — the same year our Passivhaus project The Deerings won the RIBA East Award. That combination matters in a place like Fairford, where more than 120 listed buildings sit within a conservation area designated in 1970, and where any intervention needs to balance performance with sensitivity. I am a chartered RIBA architect and ARB registered, a member of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings and the Passivhaus Trust, and accredited with The Green Register. My wife Phoebe is a conservation architect, and her perspective has shaped how we approach older buildings — not as fragile objects but as structures that have already survived centuries of change and can accommodate more, provided the work is done with understanding. Our projects have been featured in Dezeen, Grand Designs Magazine and The Modern House Journal, but the credential that matters most in a conservation area as rich as Fairford's is the patience to listen to what the buildings are already telling you.
How We Work with Homes in Fairford
Extension Design in Fairford requires a careful reading of context. The town's conservation area — administered by Cotswold District Council — covers a remarkably intact core of seventeenth and eighteenth-century Cotswold stone buildings, many of them modest in scale but precise in their proportions. Along the High Street and the streets that lead down to the River Coln, rooflines sit low, window openings are well-judged, and the local limestone gives even the simplest terrace a quiet authority. Extending a home here means understanding that language: the stone, the proportions, the way buildings relate to the street and to the river. We design extensions that hold their own against that inheritance, whether that means a contemporary addition in glass and timber that defers to a listed cottage, or a stone extension that matches the grain and coursing of its host. The Fairford Neighbourhood Plan, adopted in 2023, sets clear expectations for design quality, and we welcome that — constraint and clarity make for better architecture.
Renovations in a town with over 120 listed buildings are never routine. Many of the older properties along the Market Place and London Road carry the marks of successive generations — walls thickened, doorways repositioned, windows altered. The skill is in reading those layers before proposing new ones. My training with the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings grounds our approach in evidence and restraint: repair rather than replace, understand the structure before you change it, respect the moisture behaviour of solid stone walls bonded with lime mortar. In Fairford, where listed building consent through Cotswold District Council adds a necessary layer of scrutiny, this philosophy is not just good practice but a practical requirement.
EnerPHit — the Passivhaus Institute's certified retrofit standard — is particularly well suited to the solid Cotswold stone walls that define the older buildings in Fairford. Those walls are handsome but thermally unforgiving: thick masonry with no cavity, permeable to moisture but generous with heat loss. EnerPHit addresses this with carefully detailed internal insulation that works with the wall's moisture balance rather than against it, combined with improved airtightness at junctions and mechanical ventilation with heat recovery. The result is a home that performs like a modern building but looks exactly as it did from the street — an approach that matters when every change along the river frontage or the Market Place is visible to the whole town. It is sustainability as a force to create comfort, economy and longevity rather than as a compromise.
For homes in Fairford that sit outside the listed building constraints — the twentieth-century developments that ring the older core — Sustainable Design offers a different kind of opportunity. Here, the conversation shifts from conservation to performance: orientation, glazing ratios, material choices, long-term running costs. PassivHaus Design takes those principles to their most rigorous conclusion, delivering homes that need almost no conventional heating. New Build Design on allocated sites within and around Fairford must still respond to the Cotswold stone character that the Neighbourhood Plan protects, but it can do so with contemporary confidence rather than pastiche. And for exceptional sites in the countryside around the River Coln valley, Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework provides a pathway to outstanding, one-off homes where standard development would not be permitted — provided the architecture genuinely earns its place in the landscape.
Fairford is a town where the relationship between buildings and their setting has been understood for centuries — from the way St Mary's glass catches the morning light to the way stone walls follow the curve of the Coln. If you are planning work on a home here, we would welcome the conversation.