It is not often that a single architect leaves such a visible mark on a small village. In Leafield, Sir George Gilbert Scott designed both the Church of St Michael and All Angels — built between 1858 and 1860 in the Early English style, its tower completed in 1874 — and the vicarage beside it, hewn from the same golden Cotswold stone just a few years earlier. Stand on the green and you can see the coherence: the same hand, the same conviction about material and proportion, the same belief that even a modest parish deserves buildings of real ambition. Leafield sits at nearly two hundred metres above sea level on a ridge at the western edge of what was once the royal forest of Wychwood, and the name traditionally means a clearing in the trees — a place made by opening up the land. The village grew from that clearing, and its buildings grew from the stone beneath it. That relationship between ground, forest and settlement is something I find deeply compelling as an architect.
Award-winning Architects in Leafield
An Architect's Practice Rooted in Craft and Conservation
I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006, and we are now based at the Oxford Eco Centre in Osney Mead. I trained at the Mackintosh School of Architecture in Glasgow, where the emphasis was always on understanding how buildings sit within their landscape and community before proposing anything new. We won the RIBA East Award for The Deerings, a Passivhaus home in Hertfordshire, and were shortlisted for a RIBA South Award for The Old Water Tower. I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the Building Design Awards in 2018 and judged the British Homes Awards in 2025. Our work has been published in Dezeen, Grand Designs Magazine and The Modern House Journal. We are members of RIBA, SPAB — the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings — the Passivhaus Trust and The Green Register, and that combination of heritage sensitivity and energy performance expertise is particularly relevant to villages like Leafield where conservation, comfort and character all need to coexist.
Architectural Services for Homes in Leafield
Leafield falls within the planning authority of West Oxfordshire District Council. The village has a designated conservation area covering its historic core, where Cotswold limestone cottages — mostly seventeenth to nineteenth century — line the lanes around the green and along Lower End. Scott's Grade II* listed church, with its squared coursed stone and stone tile roofs, sets the benchmark for material quality in the village, and any new work here needs to respect that standard. The medieval preaching cross on the green, restored with a Gothic Revival shaft in 1873, is a reminder that this village has been cared about for centuries.
Renovations in Leafield demand an understanding of how these older buildings have evolved. Many of the cottages have been extended and adapted over generations — new rooms added as families grew, rooflines adjusted, windows enlarged. Our approach, informed by SPAB principles, is to read those layers of change before proposing any intervention. My wife Phoebe is a conservation architect, and together we bring a particular care to historic buildings where every alteration becomes part of the story. The goal is always to make what is already there work better — more comfortable, more energy-efficient, more joyful to live in — without erasing what gives it character.
Extension Design in a conservation village like Leafield means working within a clear material language. The limestone rubble walls, the stone slate roofs, the modest cottage proportions — these set expectations that any addition needs to acknowledge. But acknowledgement does not mean imitation. A well-designed extension can sit alongside an older building with confidence, finding the right proportions and rhythms while using contemporary detailing that is honest about when it was made. The best results come from understanding the existing building so thoroughly that the new work feels inevitable rather than imposed.
Many homes in Leafield were built with solid stone walls that are beautiful but thermally unforgiving — cold in winter, draughty around windows and doors, expensive to heat. EnerPHit, the Passivhaus Institute's retrofit standard, offers a way to transform these buildings from the inside: carefully detailed internal insulation, improved airtightness, and mechanical ventilation with heat recovery, all while preserving the external stone character that the conservation area protects. Sustainable Design is not something we apply as an afterthought — it is the starting point for every project. PassivHaus Design principles guide our new-build work too, whether as full certification or as a performance framework that prioritises comfort, low energy use and durability.
Leafield's setting on the Wychwood ridge, with open farmland rolling away towards Witney to the south-east and the remnants of the ancient forest to the north, makes the surrounding landscape an important consideration for any New Build Design. Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework allows architecturally exceptional homes in rural settings where the quality of the design justifies building in the countryside. The land around Leafield — high, open, with long views and a deep historical connection to the forest — is the kind of landscape that rewards an architect willing to think carefully about how a building meets the ground and the horizon. We welcome the challenge of designing homes that belong to their setting as naturally as the village belongs to its clearing.
From the forest clearing to Scott's church, Leafield has always been shaped by people who understood the value of building well with what the land provides. We bring that same conviction to every project: homes designed to be comfortable, to endure, and to use energy and materials as efficiently as possible. If you are considering a project in Leafield, we would welcome the conversation.