There is a detail about the Stonesfield slate trade that I find quietly extraordinary. The miners would dig limestone from narrow shafts and adits cut into the hillside, bring it to the surface still damp from the earth, and then wait. They laid the rough slabs out in the fields and let winter do the rest — frost creeping into the moisture, splitting the stone along its natural bedding planes into the thin, flat tiles that have roofed buildings across Oxfordshire for centuries. You can still see them on the older colleges in Oxford, on farmhouses along the Evenlode valley, and on the cottages of Stonesfield itself, where the material and the place share a name. It is a process that depends entirely on patience and on understanding natural forces rather than fighting them. That principle — working with what the site, the climate and the material want to do — runs through everything we do at Gresford Architects.
Award-winning Architects in Stonesfield
A Practice Shaped by Stone and SPAB Principles
I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006, and we have been Oxford-based for many years now — working from the Oxford Eco Centre in Osney Mead, well placed for the Cotswold villages where so much of our work takes place. As a RIBA Chartered Architect and ARB-registered professional I bring formal rigour, but it is my SPAB membership that defines how I approach a village like Stonesfield. I read the building first: how moisture moves through solid stone, how a Stonesfield slate roof has settled over centuries, what the lime mortar and timber framing are telling me about what the structure needs. Our EnerPHit retrofit of The Old Orchard in Oxfordshire, featured in The Modern House Journal and The Spaces, showed this approach working at scale — a period home brought to modern comfort without erasing its age. The Deerings in Hertfordshire, a Passivhaus new build that won the RIBA East Award in 2018, proved the same care applies to new construction. Both projects succeeded because they prioritised what the place and materials asked for, not what was fashionable. I was finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the Building Design Awards that same year, and in 2025 I served as a judge for the British Homes Awards. Accredited by The Green Register and a member of the Passivhaus Trust, we bring the same sensitivity to a slate-roofed cottage in Stonesfield as to a new build on open ground.
Architectural Services for a Village Shaped by Its Stone
Renovations are central to what homes in Stonesfield need. The village is a designated conservation area, managed by West Oxfordshire District Council, and the thirteenth-century Church of St James the Great, Grade II* listed, still wears its Stonesfield slate roof — a building that has stood on this ridge for eight hundred years, roofed with the material pulled from beneath it. Around it, farmhouses, cottages and boundary walls built from local Cotswold limestone give the village a cohesion that comes not from planning but from geology. The older properties — stone-built, solid-walled, often with the original slate roofs that are now irreplaceable — require an architect who understands traditional construction. Stonesfield slate cannot simply be sourced new; reclaimed tiles are matched and graded by size, laid in diminishing courses from eaves to ridge. A renovation here means working with lime mortars, stone lintels, timber structures that have shifted and settled over centuries. Through our SPAB training and our accreditation with The Green Register, we approach each of these buildings as a living system, not a set of problems to solve.
EnerPHit is the retrofit standard we recommend for older homes in Stonesfield where thermal performance matters but the external character must remain untouched. Solid stone walls lose heat steadily through winter, and conventional insulation applied without understanding can trap moisture and damage the very fabric it was meant to protect. EnerPHit works from the inside, creating a continuous thermal envelope that dramatically improves comfort and reduces energy costs while leaving the slate roofline and limestone walls exactly as they are.
Extension Design in Stonesfield means reading the grammar of the village — every older building drawn from the same limestone palette, every roof pitched to the same logic, the slate tiles diminishing in course size from eaves to ridge. An extension here needs to sit within that language, matching the mass and material of what already stands rather than competing with it. We work with reclaimed Stonesfield stone where we can source it, and with new Cotswold limestone where we cannot, always respecting the proportions that give the village its coherence. For new homes, Sustainable Design and New Build Design follow the same instinct the slate miners understood: respond to climate, use materials honestly, build to last. PassivHaus Design takes this further — fabric-first construction that delivers stable temperatures, minimal running costs and excellent air quality, working with the physics of the building exactly as frost worked with the physics of the stone. For sites in the open countryside around the Evenlode valley, Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework provides a route for architecturally outstanding homes where the design quality itself justifies the rural setting.
Stonesfield is a village where the architecture and the ground beneath it are inseparable — the same stone that forms the walls once roofed them, split by nothing more than frost and patience. If you are planning a renovation, extension or new home here, we would welcome the chance to talk about what this place asks of its buildings.