Some buildings reveal themselves slowly. Walk through Rothwell and you see the warm brown ironstone that gives the town its colour — the same Cottingham Stone that has been quarried nearby for centuries, laid in coursed rubble for cottages and dressed into ashlar for grander facades. But look more carefully at Holy Trinity Church, the longest parish church in the country at 173 feet, and you notice something else: the stone is weathering at different rates, the softer ironstone crumbling where it meets the harder limestone dressings around windows and doorways, each material ageing on its own terms. Beneath the nave floor lies one of only two medieval bone crypts surviving in England, discovered around 1700 when a gravedigger broke through into the forgotten chamber below. A building that has been accumulating layers — of stone, of use, of human lives — for the best part of a thousand years. That is what draws me to places like Rothwell: the evidence that architecture is not a fixed thing but something that moves through time, and the question of how we build well enough for the next chapter.
Award-winning Architects in Rothwell
Why Homeowners in Rothwell Trust Gresford Architects
I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006, and the practice has always been shaped by a belief that buildings should be comfortable to inhabit, economical to run and designed to last. That conviction leads naturally to both ends of the architectural spectrum — caring for historic buildings with the respect they demand, and designing new ones that perform to the highest modern standards. I am an ARB-registered and RIBA-chartered architect, a member of the Passivhaus Trust and The Green Register, and my membership of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings has been formative in how I approach older structures. SPAB teaches you to understand a building before you intervene — to read its materials, its movement, its moisture patterns — and in a town like Rothwell, where ironstone behaves differently from limestone and both behave differently from brick, that discipline matters. Our work has been recognised with the RIBA East Award for The Deerings, a Passivhaus home in Hertfordshire, and I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the 2018 Building Design Awards. We work with clients across the country, and we bring the same depth of care whether the brief is a medieval stone cottage or a contemporary new build.
Architectural Services for a Town Shaped by Ironstone and Time
Renovations sit at the heart of what Rothwell needs architecturally. The conservation area, designated in 1978, encompasses a town centre where buildings spanning several centuries stand side by side — from the eleventh-century south chancel wall of Holy Trinity Church to the Elizabethan Jesus Hospital, founded in 1593 by Owen Ragsdale, its coursed ironstone rubble and limestone dressings still sharp beneath stone slate roofs. Between them stands the Market House, built in 1578 on a cruciform plan for Sir Thomas Tresham, now Grade I listed and on Historic England's Heritage at Risk Register. The ironstone that gives these buildings their warmth is the same material that demands careful understanding: Cottingham Stone is porous and can be soft and crumbly when old, and any renovation must work with its behaviour rather than against it. Lime-based mortars, breathable renders, sympathetic repointing — these are not aesthetic choices but structural necessities when the stone itself is part of the moisture management system. Every renovation in Rothwell's conservation area will involve North Northamptonshire Council's planning team, and a proposal grounded in material understanding is far more likely to succeed than one that treats the approval process as an obstacle.
EnerPHit, the Passivhaus Institute's certified retrofit standard, offers a rigorous route to transforming how these older properties in Rothwell perform. The solid ironstone walls that characterise much of the historic core are thermally inefficient by modern standards, but they are also load-bearing and moisture-active — two qualities that rule out the kind of external cladding solutions suited to cavity-wall construction. Internal insulation must be breathable, detailed to manage the specific porosity of the Cottingham Stone rather than trapping moisture behind a vapour barrier. Combined with airtightness improvements, mechanical ventilation with heat recovery and high-performance glazing, an EnerPHit retrofit can turn a draughty stone house into one that is genuinely warm, quiet and efficient. Our retrofit of The Old Orchard in Oxfordshire — a solid-walled building brought to EnerPHit standard — demonstrated that this level of performance is achievable without sacrificing the character that makes the building worth keeping.
Extension Design matters across Rothwell's varied housing stock. The Georgian and Victorian terraces around the town centre — many of them built in the same coursed ironstone rubble as Jesus Hospital further up the hill — have rear plots that suit a well-planned ground-floor addition, the kind that opens the back of the house to daylight and garden and turns a compartmentalised layout into something that works for how families actually live now. Within the conservation area, the ironstone fabric of the original building sets strict terms: an extension should feel like a material continuation, respecting the colour, texture and coursing of the existing walls rather than defaulting to a render finish that bears no relation to what it adjoins. Outside the conservation area, particularly in the newer housing that has brought the town close to its Local Plan allocation of 1,190 dwellings, the scope widens, but the thinking stays the same — an extension should make the whole house work better, not simply add square footage.
Sustainable Design is the thread that runs through all of this — whether the project is a renovation of an ironstone listed building, a retrofit to EnerPHit standard, or a new extension designed to minimise energy demand from day one. New Build Design matters too, particularly as Rothwell continues to grow and the neighbourhood plan being prepared by the town council begins to shape what new housing looks like and where it goes. A fabric-first approach — orientation, insulation, airtightness, ventilation designed as a single system — produces homes that are comfortable, economical and built to last, qualities that serve homeowners in Rothwell just as well as anywhere else. PassivHaus Design takes that approach to its most exacting level, virtually eliminating the need for active heating by calibrating every element of the building envelope. And for those drawn to the open countryside beyond the town, Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework offers a route to a new home in a rural setting, provided the design demonstrates the kind of genuine architectural quality that justifies its position in the landscape.
Rothwell is a town where the past is not hidden away — it is there in every weathered ironstone wall, in the bone crypt beneath Holy Trinity, in Tresham's cruciform Market House still standing on Market Hill after nearly 450 years. Whether you are restoring a historic property in the conservation area, extending a family home to suit how you live now, or planning something entirely new, we would welcome the chance to talk about what your project needs and how we can help.