There is a moment in St Nicolas the Confessor that tells you everything about this village's relationship with its buildings. The massive round-headed chancel arch — twelfth-century, plain imposts, the stonework of the original Norman church — survived the thirteenth-century rebuilding and survived the Victorian restorations that followed. When George Gilbert Scott arrived in 1852 to restore the nave and add the north aisle, repointing of that ancient arch was begun and then stopped on the architect's orders. Leave it alone. The arch was doing its job. That instinct — knowing when to intervene and when to step back — is something I think about often in our work at Gresford Architects. Forest Hill sits on the northeastern brow of a ridge above the Oxfordshire plain, a village of limestone and timber where centuries of building have accumulated quietly, and the best architecture here has always been the kind that listens to what is already present before adding anything new.
Award-winning Architects in Forest Hill
Why Homeowners in Forest Hill Trust Gresford Architects
I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006, and we now work from the Oxford Eco Centre on Osney Mead — close to Forest Hill and deeply familiar with the character of the villages east of Oxford. We are RIBA Chartered and ARB Registered, members of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, the Passivhaus Trust and The Green Register. Our RIBA East Award for The Deerings, a certified Passivhaus in Hertfordshire, demonstrated that energy performance and genuine architectural quality are not competing ambitions. The Great Barn in Buckinghamshire, a Grade II listed restoration, taught us patience — that heritage buildings reveal their logic slowly, and that the best interventions are the ones you barely notice.
I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the 2018 Building Design Awards, and in 2025 I served as a judge for the British Homes Awards. My wife Phoebe is a conservation architect, and her influence is woven through the practice: a respect for existing fabric, an understanding that buildings carry meaning beyond their function, and an approach to alteration that honours what previous generations built.
Designing for Forest Hill's Character and Landscape
Planning applications in Forest Hill are determined by South Oxfordshire District Council. The village sits within a conservation area, and the combination of listed buildings, limestone vernacular and its elevated ridgeline setting means proposals must demonstrate genuine sensitivity to context. This is not a constraint we resist — it is the kind of challenge that produces better architecture.
Renovations in Forest Hill begin with understanding the building. The village has structures spanning centuries — from Redhill Farmhouse, an early seventeenth-century timber-framed house with limestone rubble walls and thatched roofs, to the stone cottages and later brick additions along the lanes. Each material ages differently and manages moisture in its own way. A renovation that treats limestone rubble and timber framing as interchangeable will create problems. We read each building on its own terms: its structure, its thermal behaviour, its accumulated repairs, and only then propose changes that work with rather than against what is there.
Extension Design within the conservation area requires an understanding of Forest Hill's scale. The village has a settled, modest character — low rooflines, deep plots, traditional materials — and an extension that imposes itself on that rhythm will be challenged. We design extensions that sit alongside existing structures with quiet confidence, using limestone, timber or complementary materials and respecting the proportions that give the village its coherence.
EnerPHit, the Passivhaus Institute's certified retrofit standard, offers a route to dramatically improved thermal performance in older homes without altering their external character. In a conservation area where the appearance of a building matters to the whole village, EnerPHit's emphasis on internal insulation, airtightness and mechanical ventilation with heat recovery means a stone cottage can become genuinely comfortable and efficient while looking from the lane exactly as it has for generations. Sustainable Design principles run through every project we take on — from the orientation of new glazing for passive solar gain to the specification of lime mortars that allow historic walls to breathe.
PassivHaus Design sets the benchmark for any new-build element, achieving heating demands a fraction of those in a conventional home through superinsulation, triple glazing and airtight construction. For New Build Design in the countryside around Forest Hill, the rolling landscape near Shotover offers the kind of setting where Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework comes into play — a route for an exceptional dwelling in open countryside, where the architecture must demonstrate that it could not be built anywhere else. The ridge, the long views, the particular quality of this ground between the Oxfordshire clay vale and the wooded slopes of Shotover Hill — these are the conditions that should shape the architecture, not the other way around.
Forest Hill has been shaped by people who understood when to build and when to leave well alone — from the Norman masons who raised that chancel arch to the Victorian architect who chose not to touch it. If you are considering a project here, whether renovating a listed cottage, improving the energy performance of an older home or exploring new architecture in the surrounding landscape, we would welcome the conversation.