In the nave of St Andrew's Church in Kingham, the pew bench-ends are carved from a pale composition stone in traceried Gothic patterns, each topped with spiky poppy-head finials. They were made in the nineteenth century by John Jackson, a local stonemason whose descendants still live in the village. What strikes me about them is not just the craftsmanship but the instinct — a village craftsman choosing to work in stone rather than the oak you would expect, because stone was the material he knew, the material that surrounded him. That instinct runs through the whole of Kingham. From the church tower to the cottages around the green, from the buttressed village hall of 1910 to the boundary walls along the lanes, everything is built from the same honey-toned Cotswold limestone. It gives the village a coherence that is rare and worth protecting, and it is the kind of material intelligence that we try to carry into every project at Gresford Architects.
Award-winning Architects in Kingham
Architects Who Understand the Cotswolds
I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006, and we now work from the Oxford Eco Centre on Osney Mead — close enough to Kingham and the western Oxfordshire villages to know their character well. We are RIBA Chartered and ARB registered, and my membership of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings gives us a particular sensitivity to places like Kingham where forty-three listed buildings sit within a designated conservation area. Our Passivhaus Trust membership and Green Register accreditation reflect a conviction that conservation and environmental performance are not in tension — they are complementary. The Deerings, a Passivhaus home we designed in Hertfordshire, won a RIBA East Award in 2018, the same year I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the Building Design Awards. In 2025, I judged the British Homes Awards. Our work has been featured in Dezeen, The Modern House Journal and Grand Designs Magazine.
Designing for a Village Built in Stone
The village is centred on a wide green, with seventeenth- and eighteenth-century cottages of Cotswold stone arranged around it — some thatched, some with stone tile roofs, all of a piece with the landscape. Kingham sits in the broad Evenlode valley within the Cotswolds National Landscape, and that combination of landscape designation and conservation area status means every project here is scrutinised for its impact on the character of the village and the wider setting. This is not a place for architects who treat context as an afterthought — it demands a genuine understanding of local materials, scale and settlement patterns. Many of these homes are beautiful but thermally unforgiving: solid stone walls with no cavity, single-glazed windows, draughty timber floors. Renovations here require care and knowledge. The fabric of a listed cottage in Kingham cannot simply be wrapped in insulation — the breathability of the stone, the moisture balance of the walls, the character of each elevation all have to be understood before any intervention begins. That is exactly the kind of project we are drawn to.
EnerPHit, the Passivhaus Institute's certified retrofit standard, offers a structured approach to improving older homes without compromising their heritage character. In a village where the stonework itself is the defining feature, internal wall insulation, improved airtightness and mechanical ventilation with heat recovery can transform comfort and energy use while leaving the external appearance untouched. For homeowners in Kingham living through another winter in a house that is cold by February, EnerPHit is not an abstract standard — it is a practical route to a warmer, quieter home.
Extension Design in Kingham asks a particular question: how does a new element sit alongside centuries of Cotswold stone? The answer is rarely to mimic the original building. More often it is to find a complementary language — honest about its own time, respectful of scale and material, deferring to the older structure without pretending to be part of it. Sustainable Design principles run through this process naturally: passive solar orientation, durable materials with low embodied energy, and a fabric-first approach that reduces reliance on mechanical systems.
New Build Design within the Cotswolds National Landscape requires a compelling case for any new dwelling. PassivHaus Design offers part of that case — a home that achieves extraordinary comfort and energy performance, with heating demand a fraction of conventional construction, through superinsulation, triple glazing and careful attention to airtightness. Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework provides an alternative route for truly exceptional residential design in the open countryside, where the quality of the architecture and its response to the landscape are themselves the justification for planning permission. In a setting as protected as the Evenlode valley, that bar is high — but it is one we have experience meeting.
Kingham appeared in the Domesday Book as Caningeham — the homestead of Caega's people. Ralph de Chasteleyn began rebuilding the church around 1313, and his canopied tomb recess still sits in the chancel's north wall, seven centuries of weather having softened the foliated cross on its slab. In 2004, Country Life named Kingham England's favourite village. What has endured through all of that is the stone: quarried locally, shaped by hand, holding the village together. If you are considering a project in Kingham, we would welcome the chance to continue that conversation between building and place.