What strikes me about Kempsford is the ambition written into its stone. This is a small Thames-side village in the south of Gloucestershire, a couple of miles south of Fairford, and yet the central tower of St Mary the Virgin — built in the 1390s as a gift from John of Gaunt — rises with a confidence that belongs to a much larger settlement. Three stages of dressed stone, stepped diagonal buttresses, crocketed pinnacles, an openwork parapet: it is architecture making a statement about permanence and craft. The domestic buildings around it tell a quieter but equally revealing story. In the early seventeenth century, homes in Kempsford were mostly mud walling and thatch. By the eighteenth century, the village had rebuilt itself in local stone — a material transition that changed not just the look of the place but the way its buildings breathe, settle and age. That layering of ambition, adaptation and honest materials is what makes Kempsford the kind of village we find genuinely rewarding to work in.
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I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006, and we now work with clients across the country from our studio in Oxford. What connects the projects I find most satisfying — whether a Passivhaus new build in Hertfordshire or a heritage renovation in Oxfordshire — is the same instinct visible in Kempsford's own history: the belief that good buildings emerge from understanding materials, climate and context, not from imposing a style. We are RIBA chartered and ARB registered, and our RIBA East Award for The Deerings in 2018 recognised what happens when that discipline is applied rigorously. My membership of SPAB reflects a particular commitment to understanding historic buildings on their own terms, an approach that matters in a conservation village where the stone walls carry centuries of accumulated knowledge about how to manage moisture, weight and light.
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Renovations in Kempsford often begin with that material transition. Many of the village's stone houses date from the eighteenth-century rebuilding, and while the walls are solid and well-made, the interiors have typically been altered several times — rooms subdivided, windows reduced, ceilings lowered in attempts to retain heat. A renovation to one of these properties means peeling back those later interventions to understand the original building's logic: where the stone walls were intended to breathe, how the roof structure distributes load, what the original proportions achieved in terms of light and air. Kempsford sits within a conservation area, and Cotswold District Council expects any alteration to respect the character of the village's built fabric, which aligns naturally with how we work. We draw on our SPAB training and a fabric-first philosophy that treats the existing building as the starting point, not an obstacle.
The village's eighteenth-century stone houses — the ones that replaced the earlier mud and thatch — present a particular challenge and opportunity for EnerPHit. These thick-walled properties have regulated damp for two centuries through their material itself: breathable lime mortar, capillary pathways through the masonry, a balance between stone and air that earlier builders understood intuitively. The certified retrofit standard sets measurable targets for airtightness and insulation, but its real strength in Kempsford is the rigour it demands around moisture management — you cannot simply seal over what the stone already knows how to do. We tailor each specification to the building: a former farmhouse near Dudgrove responds differently from a more modest cottage closer to St Mary's, and the EnerPHit framework accommodates that variation. The result is homes that are warmer, quieter, and significantly cheaper to heat — more comfortable to inhabit, more economical to run, and healthier to live in.
Extension Design for homes in Kempsford demands an understanding of how this village sits together — stone walls, slate roofs, and proportions that defer to the tower rather than compete with it. Cotswold District Council's conservation area requirements set the formal framework, but the real constraint is the streetscape itself: a terrace of eighteenth-century cottages along the High Street reads as a single composition, and an extension to one must respect that collective rhythm. The details of threshold, material and fenestration determine whether what you add enhances or merely appends. We find these constraints productive — they force the kind of careful thinking about light, garden and the join between old and new that produces the best results.
Sustainable Design connects every service we offer, from the fabric-first approach that underpins our renovation work to the rigorous energy modelling behind PassivHaus Design. We delivered PassivHaus to award-winning effect on The Deerings in Hertfordshire, and that same discipline applies wherever we build. For New Build Design near Kempsford, the conservation area and the village's stone-built character set clear expectations for how a new home should sit within its surroundings — responding to the existing material palette rather than importing something foreign. In the wider Thames-side landscape beyond the village, where the Cotswold Water Park has reshaped the character of the countryside, Paragraph 84 can provide a route to permission for an exceptional new home where the architecture itself — its response to water, light and open landscape — becomes the justification for building.
If you are considering a renovation, an extension, or a new home in Kempsford or the surrounding area, we would welcome the conversation. A village that rebuilt itself in stone three centuries ago, beneath a tower raised by a duke who understood the power of good craftsmanship, deserves architecture that continues to take materials and place seriously.