There is a moment, walking into the Church of the Holy Innocents in Highnam for the first time, when the interior stops you. Every surface is painted — chancel, nave ceiling, the great arch above — in frescoes that Thomas Gambier Parry applied with his own hand using a technique he developed himself from studying Italian masters. John Betjeman called it the most complete Victorian church in the country, and Henry Woodyer's Grade I listed building, consecrated in 1851, remains an extraordinary act of personal conviction: one person's belief that craft, material, and meaning could come together in a single place and endure. That kind of commitment — the idea that a building should be made with care, that its materials should be chosen with intention, and that the result should serve the people who use it for generations — is something I think about every time we begin a new project.
Award-winning Architects in Highnam
Trusted by Clients Across the Country
Gresford Architects works with clients throughout the country, and I founded the practice in London in 2006 before we moved to our current base in Oxford. We are accredited with The Green Register and members of the Passivhaus Trust — credentials that matter particularly in a village like Highnam, where much of the housing dates from the mid-twentieth century and stands to benefit most from thoughtful energy upgrades. Our approach to older buildings is informed by membership of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, and in a parish that holds two Grade I listed structures — the church and Highnam Court itself, the seventeenth-century house that Gambier Parry transformed — that sensitivity to what already exists runs through everything we do. The RIBA East Award we received for The Deerings in Hertfordshire, a certified Passivhaus new build, and our shortlisting for The Old Water Tower at the RIBA South Awards show that rigorous sustainability and design ambition work best when they are inseparable. I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the Building Design Awards in 2018, and in 2025 I served as a judge for the British Homes Awards. We are RIBA chartered and ARB registered, and we bring the same depth of care to a post-war semi as we do to a listed country house.
How We Work with Homes in Highnam
Extension Design is where many projects in Highnam begin. The Maidenhall estate, which forms the core of the village, was built largely between the late 1930s and the early 1960s, with further phases through the 1970s and 1980s. These are solid, well-proportioned homes, but they were designed for a different era — smaller kitchens, fewer bathrooms, limited connection between indoor and outdoor space. A well-designed extension can transform how a family lives in one of these houses, opening up the ground floor to the garden, bringing in natural light, and adding the flexible space that modern life demands. Highnam's Neighbourhood Development Plan, adopted in 2017, includes Policy H2 requiring that new development demonstrates both design quality and sensitivity to the existing environment, and Tewkesbury Borough Council, which handles planning for the parish, will assess any extension against that standard. We welcome that — good design should always be the expectation, not the exception.
EnerPHit, the Passivhaus Institute's certified retrofit standard, offers a rigorous path forward for the post-war homes that make up so much of Highnam. Houses from the 1940s through the 1960s typically have uninsulated cavity walls, single-glazed windows, and draughty construction that makes them expensive to heat and uncomfortable in winter. EnerPHit addresses this through a whole-building approach: upgraded insulation, high-performance glazing, airtightness improvements, and mechanical ventilation with heat recovery. The result is a home that uses a fraction of its former energy while feeling warmer, quieter, and more comfortable throughout the year. For a village where the housing stock is predominantly of this era, the cumulative impact of thoughtful retrofit is enormous — not just for individual households but for the character of the community as a whole.
Sustainable Design runs through every project we take on, and in Highnam it connects the village's heritage with its future. Gambier Parry understood something fundamental when he commissioned the church and reshaped the Court and its grounds: that buildings and landscapes exist in relationship, that materials carry meaning, and that what you build should outlast the moment. We carry that same conviction into contemporary practice — designing homes that are comfortable, designed to last, and built to use energy and materials as efficiently as possible. Whether it is specifying locally appropriate materials for an extension on the Maidenhall estate, or ensuring that a new home on one of the village's allocated sites meets the highest energy performance standards, sustainability is not a constraint we apply after the design is complete. It is where the design begins.
Renovations in Highnam range from updating the interiors of mid-century homes to more sensitive work on the parish's older buildings. Where a project involves a listed or historically significant structure, our membership of SPAB and the experience my wife Phoebe brings as a conservation architect ensure that any intervention respects the building's history while making it work for life today. Highnam's Neighbourhood Plan also encourages self-build through Policy H1, and for those considering building their own home in the parish, New Build Design and PassivHaus Design offer routes to homes that are genuinely tailored to their occupants — more comfortable to inhabit, more economical to run, and more joyful to live in. Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework provides a further route for exceptional new homes in the open countryside surrounding the village, where design quality must justify the development in its own right.
Highnam is a village shaped by one person's extraordinary vision for what buildings could be, and that legacy of ambition and craft still resonates. If you are considering a project here — whether extending a family home, upgrading a post-war house to modern comfort standards, or building something entirely new — we would welcome the conversation.