You could drive through Stone on the A38 and register very little — a quiet village between Bristol and Gloucester, the Little Avon River slipping under the road almost unnoticed. But step off that road and look up at All Saints' Church, and the ambition of this place becomes unmistakable. The tower was added around 1400, three stages rising through stepped diagonal buttresses to a pierced parapet of cusped lancet panels, corner pinnacles, and a recessed ribbed spire crowned with an eagle. Inside, thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Easter Sepulchres face each other across the nave — carved canopied recesses that once framed the most important ceremony of the medieval liturgical year. That kind of care, that willingness to invest extraordinary craft in a small community, is what makes working in villages like Stone so compelling. The architecture tells you that ambition has never been a function of size.
Award-winning Architects in Stone
Experience That Reads Buildings Honestly
I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006, and we now work with clients across the country from our studio in Oxford. We are RIBA chartered and ARB registered, members of the Passivhaus Trust and The Green Register, and I am a member of SPAB, the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. Our RIBA East Award for The Deerings in Hertfordshire recognised a Passivhaus home that proved low-energy design can be warm and beautiful, not clinical. The RIBA South Awards shortlisted The Old Water Tower, and I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the 2018 Building Design Awards. In 2025 I served as a judge at the British Homes Awards. Our projects have appeared in Dezeen, The Modern House Journal, and Grand Designs Magazine — from listed building restorations like The Great Barn in Buckinghamshire to certified Passivhaus new builds. That range of experience is what we bring to every commission, whether it involves a Grade II farmhouse in the Berkeley Vale or a family home that needs more space.
How We Work With Homes in Stone
Extension Design is often where the conversation begins in a village like Stone. Homes here have grown organically over generations — Hall Farmhouse and Old Court Farmhouse are both Grade II listed, built in periods when rooms were added as families and farming needs demanded — and that pattern of incremental growth is part of the village's character. A good extension continues it. We start by studying the proportions, materials, and orientation of what already exists, then design outward from there: where the light falls, how the garden connects, what the relationship is between old walls and new spaces. Stroud District Council handles planning for Stone, and any proposal needs to sit comfortably within the established grain of the village, particularly where listed buildings are involved. The goal is not to mimic what is already there but to add something that belongs — a contemporary intervention that reads as the next honest chapter in a building's story.
Sustainable Design runs through everything we do, and in Stone it takes a particular shape. The village sits where the Berkeley Vale meets the lowlands draining into the Severn, and homes here face the same challenges common to this part of Gloucestershire: older solid-walled construction that can be draughty and expensive to heat, damp that creeps through masonry in wet winters, and the question of how to make a home more comfortable without losing its character. We approach sustainability not as a constraint but as an opportunity — to create homes that are more comfortable to inhabit, more economical to run, and more joyful to live in. That means thinking about fabric first: improving the thermal envelope, managing moisture movement, reducing energy demand before adding technology. It means designing for the era in which we live, where comfort and responsibility are not opposites but partners.
Renovations in Stone require patience and close attention. A village with a Grade II* listed church and several listed farmhouses has a built fabric shaped by centuries of adaptation — lias stone, render over rubble, brick additions from different eras, roof structures that have been raised and altered. My SPAB training taught me to let the building tell its own story before imposing a new one: to read the evidence of each phase of construction, understand what is working, and intervene only where it genuinely improves the building's performance and the lives of the people inside it. Where listed building consent is required, Stroud District Council will want to see that the proposed works respect the significance of the structure, and our approach — grounded in evidence, careful in specification — is designed to satisfy both the building and the planning authority.
EnerPHit, the Passivhaus Institute's certified retrofit standard, offers a disciplined route to transforming the energy performance of older homes — and in Stone, where solid lias walls and rubble construction must be left to breathe, that discipline matters. Internal wall insulation carefully detailed to respect moisture movement, windows upgraded without losing the proportions that give a farmhouse its character, airtightness calibrated to what centuries-old masonry can tolerate. Our EnerPHit retrofit at The Old Orchard in Oxfordshire, featured in The Modern House and The Spaces, delivered exactly these results: stable temperatures, negligible heating bills, and original fabric fully respected. PassivHaus Design applies the same physics to new construction — superinsulation, airtightness, and mechanical ventilation with heat recovery — creating homes that barely need heating even on the coldest Berkeley Vale mornings. New Build Design opportunities within or near Stone would benefit from this approach: homes that are comfortable, designed to last, and built to use energy and materials as efficiently as possible. For sites in the open countryside, Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework permits exceptional new homes where design quality justifies a departure from normal restrictions — a policy that rewards the kind of ambition that built All Saints' spire six centuries ago.
If you are considering a project in Stone — whether extending a home that has grown with its family for generations, renovating a building whose walls carry centuries of adaptation, or building something new that honours this village's long tradition of quiet ambition — we would welcome the conversation.