Walk into St Andrew's Church in Shrivenham and you encounter something rare — a building that was almost entirely reimagined in 1638, during the reign of Charles I, at a time when virtually no churches were being built in England. Lord Craven kept the sturdy medieval tower with its crossing arches, then built long arms from each arch to create the cruciform plan we see today. What strikes me as an architect is the confidence of the fusion: rounded arches resting on Italianate Tuscan columns, late Perpendicular meeting Classical in a single space. It is not pastiche. It is not demolition and replacement. It is a conversation between what was already there and something entirely new, and nearly four centuries later the building holds together with a quiet authority that neither style alone could have achieved.
That instinct — to work with inherited structure rather than against it — runs through both Shrivenham and neighbouring Watchfield. These are villages in the western Vale of White Horse where coursed rubble stone and thatch sit alongside later brick and tile, where thatched cottages share streets with Georgian frontages, and where the presence of the Defence Academy of the United Kingdom has brought a steady flow of families who arrive from elsewhere and find themselves drawn to something rooted and particular. Settlement here stretches back to at least 400 BC, through a Roman villa, a Domesday entry, and centuries of quiet agricultural life under the Barrington estate. The architecture carries all of it.
Why We Are Trusted for Projects in Shrivenham and Watchfield
I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006 and later moved the practice to Oxford, where we work from the Eco Centre at Osney Mead. We are a short drive from the western Vale and know this landscape well — the open farmland stretching north towards Faringdon, the chalk escarpment rising south towards the Ridgeway, the particular planning sensitivities that come with working in a conservation area village under the Vale of White Horse District Council. I am ARB Registered and RIBA Chartered, a member of the Passivhaus Trust, accredited by The Green Register, and a member of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings — a combination that reflects how we approach every commission, whether it involves a listed cottage in Shrivenham or a new family home on the edge of Watchfield.
Our projects have been recognised at national level. The Deerings, a certified Passivhaus home in Hertfordshire, won a RIBA East Award in 2018, and The Old Water Tower was shortlisted for RIBA South Awards. I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the Building Design Awards, and in 2025 I served as a judge for the British Homes Awards. The Old Orchard — an EnerPHit retrofit here in Oxfordshire — has been profiled in The Modern House Journal and The Spaces, and our Ritson Road extension in Hackney was featured in Dezeen. What connects all of this work is a conviction that sustainability and beauty are not separate ambitions — they sharpen each other.
Architectural Services for Homes in Shrivenham and Watchfield
Both villages fall within the planning authority of the Vale of White Horse District Council. Shrivenham has a designated conservation area covering its historic core, and the village contains a number of listed structures including the Grade I listed Church of St Andrew, Beckett Hall, and the Memorial Hall. Watchfield, a mile to the north, has its own listed buildings including the early nineteenth-century Grade II listed windmill. For an architect, the character of these villages presents a specific set of considerations — stone vernacular, sensitive settings, and a planning framework that rightly expects new work to respect what already exists.
Renovations form a natural starting point for much of what we do in this part of Oxfordshire. The older buildings in Shrivenham are constructed from the local coursed rubble stone with ashlar dressings — materials that breathe, that manage moisture through their own mass, and that demand an understanding of traditional construction before you lay a hand on them. My wife Phoebe is a conservation architect, and through her work and our shared membership of SPAB, I have a deep respect for the difference between improving a building and inadvertently damaging it. Renovating a stone cottage in a conservation area means understanding how the building was put together, why it has lasted, and how to make it work for the way people live now without undermining what has kept it standing for centuries.
Extension Design is one of the most common and rewarding commissions in villages like Shrivenham and Watchfield. Many of the older cottages were built for smaller households and simpler domestic routines — kitchens tucked into the back, low ceilings, rooms opening onto rooms without the kind of flowing space that families expect today. The Defence Academy brings professionals and their families to the area, many of whom fall in love with a stone cottage or a period house and then discover that the building needs to grow with them. The best extensions in this context do not try to disguise themselves as original fabric. They acknowledge the join between old and new — a shift in material, a change in roofline, a generous opening where a blank wall once stood — and turn that contrast into something that enriches both parts of the building.
EnerPHit, the Passivhaus Institute's certified retrofit standard, offers a disciplined route to making older homes genuinely comfortable without compromising their character. In a village like Shrivenham, where rubble stone walls and timber-framed elements coexist, thermal improvement is not a matter of wrapping the building in insulation and hoping for the best. It requires careful analysis of how the existing fabric manages heat and moisture, targeted internal insulation that follows the building's own logic, upgraded windows that respect the proportions of the originals, and mechanical ventilation with heat recovery that delivers fresh air without the draughts that stone cottages are famous for.
Sustainable Design is the thread that runs through everything we do. Whether we are specifying locally sourced materials for a renovation in Shrivenham's conservation area or designing a new home to certified Passivhaus standards, the principle is the same: buildings should be comfortable, designed to last, and built to use energy and materials as efficiently as possible. PassivHaus Design takes that principle to its most rigorous expression — a home engineered for airtightness, insulated to extraordinary levels, oriented and glazed to harvest daylight and solar gain, and requiring almost no conventional heating. The Deerings demonstrated that a certified Passivhaus home can be as warm in character as it is in performance.
For families looking beyond the existing village envelope, New Build Design offers the chance to create something from the ground up — a home designed around how you actually live, built to the highest environmental standards, and shaped by the landscape it sits within. Watchfield has seen recent growth, and the character of new development matters. A new home here should take its cues from the rubble stone and agricultural vernacular that define the area, not from a generic pattern book.
The open countryside of the western Vale — the flat, expansive farmland stretching between Shrivenham and Faringdon, the views south towards the chalk downs — also opens the possibility of building under Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework. The threshold is exacting: the design must be of outstanding quality and must demonstrably enhance its setting. In landscape this open, a building has nowhere to hide. Every decision — the massing, the materials, the relationship between the house and the land around it — is visible and answerable. That level of scrutiny is something we welcome, because the best architecture has always come from constraint.
Shrivenham and Watchfield are villages where the layers of history are still legible in the built fabric — from the Tuscan columns of a church rebuilt in the midst of civil war, to the rubble stone cottages of the Barrington estate, to the twentieth-century arrival of the military college that reshaped the community without erasing its character. If you are considering a project here — a sensitive renovation, an extension that gives your home the space it needs, or something entirely new on the edge of the Vale — I would welcome the chance to talk about what it could become.
