Hartpury is often described as a village with five ends and no centre — Blackwells End, Buttersend, Corsend, Moorend, Murrells End — and yet that description misses something important. Walk through the churchyard of St Mary the Virgin and you find a cluster of buildings that belongs together as surely as any village green: a twelfth-century church whose tower was added in the fourteenth century, a Grade II* tithe barn stretching one hundred and sixty-one feet across eleven bays, and beside them a bee shelter carved from Minchinhampton weatherstone and Painswick freestone with a precision that most architects would reserve for a chapel. The stonemason Paul Tuffley built it in the early nineteenth century, drawing on two different Gloucestershire quarries to create something both ornamental and entirely functional — twenty-eight boles arranged across two levels for housing bee skeps. That kind of attention, the willingness to bring real craft to a practical problem, is what I admire most in architecture. It is the thread that runs through everything we do at Gresford Architects.
Award-winning Architects in Hartpury
Why Clients in Hartpury and Beyond Trust Gresford Architects
I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006, and we now work from our studio in Oxford with clients throughout the country. We are members of the Passivhaus Trust and accredited by The Green Register, commitments that reflect a core belief: that buildings should be comfortable, designed to last, and use energy and materials as efficiently as possible. Our Passivhaus home The Deerings in Hertfordshire won the RIBA East Award in 2018, and I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the Building Design Awards the same year. As a member of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, I bring the same rigour to older structures — understanding how they were built, how they perform, and how to intervene without doing harm. In a parish like Hartpury, where Grade II* listed buildings sit alongside farmhouses, converted barns and more recent homes along the A417, that dual expertise in environmental performance and heritage sensitivity is exactly what thoughtful work demands.
How We Work with Homes in Hartpury
Sustainable Design shapes every project we take on, and in a village like Hartpury it connects to something the parish already understands instinctively. This is a place where thirty acres of orchards have been planted to conserve the National Perry Pear Collection, where the landscape between the five scattered settlement ends remains open and agricultural, and where the relationship between buildings and the land they sit on has never been merely decorative. We design with that same respect for resources — reducing energy demand, specifying materials honestly, and ensuring that every building we touch performs better for the decades ahead. Forest of Dean District Council handles planning for Hartpury, and their local plan recognises the fragmented character of the village, which means new proposals need to demonstrate genuine sensitivity to the open spaces and rural setting that define the parish.
Renovations in Hartpury call for an architect who can read a building before picking up a pencil. The older properties here are diverse — the tithe barn built for St Peter's Abbey in Gloucester used coursed, squared stone under a tiled roof, while other homes in the parish reflect the Severn Vale tradition of timber framing, local brick and rendered rubble. Each construction method has its own logic for how moisture moves, how loads are carried, and where later alterations have introduced problems. We approach every renovation by understanding the building's original intentions, identifying where cement pointing, impermeable coatings or poorly considered additions have disrupted its performance, and designing repairs that restore the building's ability to function as it was meant to. The seventeenth-century watermill on the River Leadon, occupying a site that may date back to the Domesday survey, is a reminder of how long buildings in this parish have been adapted and maintained — each generation making changes that work with what came before, not against it.
Extension Design is often the most practical solution for families in Hartpury who need more room without leaving the village. The scattered settlement pattern means that many homes here sit on generous plots with space to grow, but space alone does not make a good extension — the design needs to respond to the proportions, materials and character of the existing house, and to the open rural landscape that surrounds it. Whether that means a single-storey garden room that draws the orchard landscape into daily life or a more substantial addition that picks up the roofline of an older farmhouse, we design extensions that feel considered rather than bolted on. Where homes in Hartpury sit close to listed structures, Forest of Dean District Council will assess the impact on the setting of those buildings, and our experience with heritage-sensitive design ensures that the case for an extension is made clearly from the outset.
PassivHaus Design delivers the highest standard of energy performance for new construction, combining superinsulation, airtightness and mechanical ventilation with heat recovery to create homes that are comfortable year-round with minimal energy input. EnerPHit, the Passivhaus Institute's certified retrofit standard, applies the same rigour to existing buildings — particularly valuable for the solid-walled properties found across Hartpury, where thermal performance can be transformed without compromising external character. Our EnerPHit retrofit of The Old Orchard in Oxfordshire, featured in The Modern House, demonstrated exactly this approach. New Build Design in the open landscape around Hartpury requires architecture that earns its place, and for exceptional rural sites beyond the settlement boundaries, Paragraph 84 provides a planning route where the quality of design itself justifies the development.
If you are considering work on a home in Hartpury — whether that means improving its energy performance, carefully renovating an older property, or extending to gain the space your family needs — we would welcome the conversation. The best buildings in this parish have always balanced craft with purpose, and that is the standard we hold ourselves to.