Stonehouse is a town that carries its own origin in its name. When it appeared in the Domesday Book of 1086 as "Stanhus," the distinction was simple and telling — here was a manor house built of stone at a time when most were wattle and daub. That impulse to build well, to choose the material that would last, has never quite left the place. Walk through the town centre and you move between centuries of building in a few hundred metres: the fourteenth-century tower of St Cyr's Church standing beside a nave rebuilt by Henry Crisp in 1854, the Grade II* listed Stonehouse Court with its 1601 origins and the remarkable interior reworking by Edwin Lutyens in 1906, and then the Victorian terraces and red brick that arrived when the town's own brickmaking industry flourished from the 1850s onwards. For an architect, that layering of materials and periods is not a problem to solve but a conversation to join — and it is exactly the kind of conversation I find most rewarding.
Award-winning Architects in Stonehouse
An Architect You Can Trust in Stonehouse
I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006, and we are now based in Oxford, working with clients across the country. The practice grew from a conviction that sustainability is not a constraint but an opportunity — a force to create homes that are more comfortable to inhabit, more economical to run and more joyful to live in. We call it the marriage of the poetic and the practical, and it runs through everything we do, from Passivhaus new builds to the careful retrofit of period homes. 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. Our work has been featured in Dezeen, The Modern House Journal and Grand Designs Magazine. I am a chartered RIBA architect and ARB registered, a member of the Passivhaus Trust and The Green Register, and a member of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings — a combination of credentials that matters in a town like Stonehouse, where a Lutyens-altered manor sits alongside a canal-side industrial heritage conservation area and a major new housing development at Great Oldbury.
Architectural Services for Homes in Stonehouse
Extension Design is where much of our work in a town like Stonehouse begins. The housing stock here is genuinely varied — Victorian terraces built from the red brick that the town itself produced, mid-century estates, and the older stone-built properties closer to the church and canal. Many of these homes were designed for smaller households and different patterns of living, and families across the town have outgrown them. A well-considered extension can transform how a house works: opening a kitchen into a garden, adding a bedroom or workspace, bringing daylight into rooms that face the wrong way. The challenge in Stonehouse is responding to that variety of materials and periods — a rear extension to a Victorian brick terrace demands a different approach than one to a stone cottage near St Cyr's Church, and getting the proportions, materials and relationship to the existing building right is what separates good architecture from mere building work. Stroud District Council handles planning applications for the town, and we work within their expectations and the policies of the Stonehouse Neighbourhood Development Plan to deliver extensions that sit naturally in their context.
New Build Design matters increasingly as Stonehouse grows. The Great Oldbury development to the south of the town represents one of the most significant housing allocations in the Stroud District Local Plan, with around 1,350 new homes planned alongside community facilities, a primary school and green infrastructure. That scale of growth brings both opportunity and responsibility. We believe new homes should be designed from first principles — oriented for daylight, shaped to manage thermal performance naturally, detailed with materials that will weather and age honestly rather than deteriorate. Sustainable Design is integral to this process from the earliest site analysis through to the specification of the building envelope, because a home that works with its climate rather than against it is not only kinder to the planet but genuinely better to live in. In a town that has been making its own building materials since the 1850s, there is something fitting about insisting that every new home earns its place through the quality of its construction and its relationship to the landscape around it.
EnerPHit, the Passivhaus Institute's retrofit standard, offers a rigorous approach to the solid-walled homes that define so much of the housing stock in Stonehouse. The Victorian terraces of red brick, built when the town's own brickmaking industry was at its height, are handsome from the street — but solid-walled construction, for all its character, bleeds heat in winter. Draughts find every gap, and energy bills climb relentlessly. EnerPHit transforms these homes by treating them as complete systems: upgrading the thermal envelope, dramatically improving airtightness, introducing mechanical ventilation with heat recovery, and ensuring that every intervention works in concert with the whole. The result is a home that reads exactly as it always has — the same red brick facade, the same proportion and rhythm on the street — but performing at a level its original builders could not have imagined, with stable temperatures, fresh air and dramatically lower running costs.
Renovations carry particular weight in a town with Stonehouse's depth of history. The Stroud Industrial Heritage Conservation Area follows the Stroudwater Navigation through the town, and buildings along the canal corridor require an understanding of historic construction methods and a sensitivity to the character that earned the designation. Stonehouse Court itself — rebuilt in 1601, reimagined by Lutyens three centuries later — is proof that thoughtful renovation can honour what exists while making it work for a new generation. My membership of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings reflects this approach: understanding how lime mortars, stone dressings, timber frames and brick bonds work together is essential when the building you are working with has been standing for centuries.
PassivHaus Design applies the same physics-first thinking to new construction at the highest standard of comfort and energy efficiency, and for anyone considering a self-build in or around Stonehouse it represents the gold standard — homes that need almost no conventional heating, maintain stable indoor temperatures year-round, and are designed to last. Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework provides a route to building exceptional homes in the open countryside beyond settlement boundaries, and the landscape around Stonehouse — where the Severn Vale meets the western edge of the Cotswolds — is the kind of setting where truly outstanding architecture, rooted in sustainability and landscape sensitivity, can make a compelling case.
Stonehouse has understood material and place since before it had its name — a stone house in a landscape of timber, a brickmaking town that sent its products across the world, and now a growing community shaping its next chapter at Great Oldbury and along the restored canal. Whether you are extending a family home, retrofitting a Victorian terrace, or building something new, we would welcome the conversation.