South Cerney is a village shaped by two quite different relationships with the ground beneath it. The Cotswold limestone that runs through this part of Gloucestershire gave the village its building material — the coursed stone of Atkyns Manor on Silver Street, the dressed ashlar of All Hallows Church, the stone slate roofs that still cover the older cottages along School Lane and Upper Up. But the gravel beds that sat alongside that limestone have given South Cerney something else entirely: the Cotswold Water Park, over a hundred and eighty lakes spread across the landscape where extraction once took place. Walk through the conservation area and you are in a village that could be any age, stone walls and mullioned windows and narrow lanes converging at the medieval cross where the High Street meets Silver Street. Step beyond it and you are in a landscape that barely existed fifty years ago. That tension between the ancient and the remade is what makes this place so interesting to work in as an architect.
Award-winning Architects in South Cerney
An Award-Winning Practice Working Across the Country
I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006, and we are now based in Oxford, working with clients across the country. South Cerney is the kind of village that draws us in — a place where every project asks you to understand not just the building but the layers of history it sits within. I am a chartered RIBA architect and ARB registered, a member of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, and accredited with The Green Register. My wife Phoebe is a conservation architect, and her forensic approach to historic fabric has shaped how we think about every older building we touch. Our Passivhaus project The Deerings won the RIBA East Award in 2018, and I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the Building Design Awards that same year. We have been featured in Dezeen, Grand Designs Magazine and The Modern House Journal — but what matters most in a conservation village like South Cerney is the quieter work: understanding how a seventeenth-century stone wall moves moisture, knowing when to repair rather than replace, and making every intervention feel as though it belongs.
How We Work with Homes in South Cerney
Renovations in South Cerney begin with listening to the building. All Hallows Church, Grade I listed with a Norman tower dating to around 1150 and a chancel rebuilt in the fourteenth century, has been carefully adapted across nine hundred years — and the domestic buildings in the village carry the same principle forward on a smaller scale. The stone cottages on Station Road, some dating from the sixteenth century with their original stone mullioned windows, were built with lime mortars that allow moisture to move through the walls. Renovating these homes means understanding that breathability before specifying any intervention: lime plaster rather than cement render, careful repair of rubble stone walls rather than wholesale replacement, and insulation strategies that work with the building's natural moisture cycle rather than sealing it shut. My membership of SPAB informs this approach at every stage, and listed building consent through Cotswold District Council is a process we know well.
Extension Design in the conservation area requires a particular sensitivity to what already exists. Along Silver Street, where Atkyns Manor sits behind its eighteenth-century gate piers and the lanes converge at stone-walled openings, the spaces between buildings matter as much as the buildings themselves. Cotswold District Council's conservation officers will expect any extension to respect the local materials palette — Cotswold limestone, stone slate or plain tile roofing, proportions that sit comfortably alongside the existing streetscape. But respecting context does not mean copying it. The best extensions here are honest about being new while speaking the same material language as their neighbours, and we design each one as a conversation between the original building and its addition — two voices in the same register.
EnerPHit, the Passivhaus Institute's certified retrofit standard, offers a disciplined route to transforming the thermal performance of older homes in South Cerney. The stone-built cottages along School Lane and Upper Up, with their stone slate roofs and solid walls, were designed for a world of open fires and natural draughts. Bringing them to modern comfort standards without compromising their character means carefully positioned internal insulation that respects the limestone's vapour permeability, improved airtightness at the junctions where heat escapes fastest, and mechanical ventilation with heat recovery to maintain air quality without the draughts the original builders relied upon. The result is a home that feels as it always has from the outside but is fundamentally more comfortable, more economical to run, and kinder to the planet.
Sustainable Design is woven through everything we do, from the choice of materials to the energy strategy for every project. PassivHaus Design takes those principles to their most exacting standard — homes that require almost no conventional heating, designed with precision around orientation, insulation and airtightness. For homes in South Cerney and the surrounding Water Park landscape, New Build Design must respond to the Cotswold stone character that defines the village while acknowledging that the lakeland setting beyond the conservation area is a landscape of its own, with its own light, its own openness, its own architectural possibilities. And for exceptional rural sites in the countryside around South Cerney, Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework provides a route to one-off homes of outstanding design — architecture that earns its place in a landscape where stone and water meet.
South Cerney is a village that has always known how to build with what lies beneath it, and the landscape around it is still being shaped by that same geology. If you are considering work on a home here, we would welcome the conversation.