Most village churches in this part of Oxfordshire have square towers — solid, predictable, built to a pattern that had served well for centuries. The builders of St Giles in Standlake chose something different. In the fourteenth century they raised an octagonal tower, three stages of geometry that catch the light in ways a square tower never could, topped with a small spire that draws the eye upward from every approach along the High Street. It is an unusual, confident piece of architecture for a small settlement in the Windrush valley, and it tells you something about the people who built it — that they valued craft, that they understood form, and that they were willing to choose the unexpected when it served the building better. That instinct drives every project we take on at Gresford Architects.
Award-winning Architects in Standlake
Why Homeowners in Standlake Trust Gresford Architects
Gresford Architects is an ARB-registered and RIBA Chartered practice founded in London in 2006, now based at the Oxford Eco Centre. We are members of SPAB — the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings — and that membership reflects a genuine commitment to understanding historic fabric before we alter it. In Standlake, where listed buildings span five centuries and the conservation area carries the logic of multiple building traditions, that sensitivity is essential. Our project The Deerings, a Passivhaus home in Hertfordshire, won a RIBA East Award in 2018, and the same year I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the Building Design Awards. We are accredited on The Green Register and members of the Passivhaus Trust. My wife Phoebe is a conservation architect, and through her work I have learned to read buildings carefully — to understand where solid walls give way to timber, where different hands and different centuries have shaped a structure. That kind of close reading matters deeply when you are working with buildings as layered as those in Standlake.
Architectural Services Shaped by the Lower Windrush Valley
Standlake falls within West Oxfordshire District Council for planning purposes. The village has a conservation area covering its historic core, where listed buildings including the fifteenth-century Manor House on the High Street — a timber-framed structure with a heraldic stone fireplace inserted around 1600 — sit alongside later cottages, farmhouses, and converted agricultural buildings on Rack End and Church Lane. The parish also contains Gaunt House, a moated house east of the village that existed by the late fifteenth century and was substantially rebuilt in stone in the early seventeenth. Beyond this historic core, significant growth arrived in the second half of the twentieth century with estates including Manor Crescent and Woodlands, and infilling along the main streets in materials that sit less comfortably alongside the older fabric.
Extension Design often begins with homes built during Standlake's later phases of growth — the Manor Crescent and Woodlands estates, and later infilling along the main streets. These houses were designed for smaller households and tighter expectations of space — cramped kitchens, living rooms that turn away from the garden. A well-designed extension opens these houses to light and air, connects interior to garden, and adds the room a growing family needs. In the conservation area, where older properties sit on tighter plots and where the roofline matters as much as the front door, extensions demand a more careful reading — understanding the materials, the proportions, the rhythm of openings along the lane before proposing anything new.
EnerPHit, the Passivhaus Institute's certified retrofit standard, offers a structured route to transforming thermal performance across Standlake's wide range of housing — from listed stone buildings with solid walls to the later houses that are often poorly insulated and draughty. Through careful insulation, improved airtightness and mechanical ventilation with heat recovery, EnerPHit cuts energy bills and transforms comfort. For the older properties in the conservation area this approach is particularly valuable: the external fabric stays untouched while the internal environment is brought into the twenty-first century.
The Manor House on the High Street — that timber-framed structure with its heraldic stone fireplace — has been evolving since the fifteenth century. Each generation has left its mark: alterations to suit the moment, additions that answered a real need, repairs that borrowed whatever materials were at hand. Renovations in Standlake work with that same instinct, reading the accumulated layers before adding the next. Across the parish, barns have become homes, farmhouses have been subdivided and reunited, and the conservation area carries the marks of centuries of change. A good renovation makes a building more comfortable, more efficient and more joyful to inhabit while preserving those marks of craft and pragmatism that make the building worth caring about.
Sustainable Design connects naturally to a landscape shaped by extraction and recovery. The gravel pits that surround Standlake — now flooded lakes forming part of the Lower Windrush Valley — are a reminder of how dramatically a landscape can be reshaped. A fabric-first approach to architecture works with the same principle: using less energy, choosing materials carefully, designing buildings that are comfortable and economical to run. PassivHaus Design takes this further, delivering homes that are not only kinder to the planet but more comfortable to inhabit and more joyful to live in. New Build Design, where planning policy permits, should take its cue from the village's own material palette — stone, timber and render — rather than defaulting to a generic suburban vocabulary. For exceptional sites in the open countryside, Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework provides a route for homes that are innovative in design and significantly enhance their immediate setting.
Standlake is a village with more architectural interest than its modest size might suggest — an octagonal church tower, a moated manor, a conservation area layered with five centuries of building. If you are considering a project here, whether extending a family home, renovating a listed building, or designing something new that earns its place in this valley, we would welcome the conversation.