What strikes me about Tetbury is the confidence. Walk beneath the Market House and look up — the open arcade of Tuscan columns that has held the first floor above the market traders since 1655 is an act of structural trust, a building that gives its ground floor entirely to air and public life. Then step inside St Mary the Virgin, rebuilt between 1777 and 1781 by Francis Hiorn, and something similar happens at a different scale: impossibly slender timber-clad piers rise to support a soaring vault, filling the nave with a quality of light that most Georgian churches never achieve. Tetbury is a town that understood proportion, that knew how to let structure breathe. As an architect, that quality of spatial generosity — the willingness to let a building be open, light, confident in its own engineering — is what draws me here.
Award-winning Architects in Tetbury
Why Clients in Tetbury Trust Gresford Architects
I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006, and we are now based in Oxford, working with clients across the country. A town like Tetbury, where the conservation area encompasses the entire historic core and where listed buildings line every principal street, requires an architect who understands the obligations that come with that heritage — and who sees them as opportunities rather than obstacles. I am a chartered RIBA architect and ARB registered, a member of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings and The Green Register, and accredited by the Passivhaus Trust. Our renovation of The Great Barn in Buckinghamshire — a Grade II listed barn restoration — demanded the same sensitivity to existing fabric that working in Tetbury's conservation area requires. The Deerings, our Passivhaus project in Hertfordshire, won the RIBA East Award in 2018, and I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the Building Design Awards the same year. In 2025, I served as a judge for the British Homes Awards. Our work has appeared in Dezeen, The Modern House Journal and Grand Designs Magazine — but what clients consistently tell us they value is the collaboration, the depth of knowledge, and the patience to get things right.
Architectural Services for a Cotswold Market Town
Renovations are where much of the most rewarding architectural work in Tetbury begins. The wool merchants' houses that line Long Street and Church Street date largely from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and many have been adapted more than once over the intervening years — rooms subdivided, fireplaces blocked, rear wings added piecemeal. Renovating well in this context means understanding what each phase contributed, reading the building's history in its fabric, and making thoughtful decisions about what to retain, what to repair, and where a contemporary intervention can bring a home into this century without erasing the centuries that came before. Cotswold District Council, as the local planning authority, and the Tetbury and Tetbury Upton Neighbourhood Plan both place significant emphasis on preserving the town's character, and our approach — rooted in my SPAB training and a deep respect for traditional construction — aligns naturally with those expectations. We work with lime mortar, local stone and traditional detailing not because the rules demand it, but because these materials are honest and they last.
Extension Design in Tetbury's conservation area calls for the same architectural fluency. The challenge is not simply to add space but to add it in a way that reads as a natural continuation of what already exists — or, where appropriate, as a clearly contemporary piece that respects the scale, materials and rhythms of its neighbours without pretending to be something it is not. In the southern Cotswolds, the material palette is broader than visitors sometimes expect; lime renders and pantiles sit comfortably alongside dressed Cotswold stone, and an extension that acknowledges this variety can achieve something more interesting than pastiche. For families in Tetbury who need more space — a kitchen that opens to the garden, a home office, a ground-floor room that works for three generations — a well-designed extension keeps them in a home and a community they already love.
EnerPHit is particularly relevant for older homes in Tetbury. Many of the stone-walled properties that give the town its character have solid walls that look and feel substantial but lose heat relentlessly — cold through the winter months, expensive to warm, sometimes damp where ventilation has fallen short. The Passivhaus Institute's EnerPHit standard provides a rigorous, certified route to transforming thermal comfort without altering the external appearance that planning policy and common sense both demand. Internal wall insulation, airtightness improvements and mechanical ventilation with heat recovery can reduce energy consumption dramatically while keeping the streetscape intact. We have lived in a home designed to Passivhaus standards, so we understand the difference this level of performance makes not as a technical abstraction but as a daily reality — warm, quiet, comfortable.
Sustainable Design is the principle that connects everything we do at Gresford Architects, whether the project is a renovation of a wool merchant's house or a contemporary extension behind a listed frontage. A building that works with its orientation, its climate and its materials — that uses thermal mass, natural light and intelligent ventilation — is not only kinder to the planet but more comfortable to inhabit, more economical to run and more joyful to live in. PassivHaus Design takes these principles to their most rigorous standard, delivering homes that require almost no conventional heating. Our project The Deerings demonstrates what this approach achieves when it is married to genuine architectural ambition. For New Build Design, opportunities within Tetbury itself are limited by the conservation area's sensitivity and the Cotswolds National Landscape designation, but where sites do come forward, we bring the same commitment to context, proportion and environmental performance that the town's best historic buildings have always embodied.
Beyond the town, the open landscape of the southern Cotswolds offers its own architectural possibilities. Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework provides a route to building exceptional new homes in rural locations where development would not normally be permitted — but only where the design is truly outstanding and sensitive to its setting. The rolling farmland around Tetbury, with its drystone walls, its beech hangers and its long views towards the Severn Vale, is a landscape that demands architecture of real quality. It is a demanding standard, and it is exactly the kind of work we find most fulfilling — homes that belong to their place rather than simply occupying it.
Tetbury is a town that has always understood the relationship between structure and light, between confidence and restraint. Whether you are renovating one of the wool merchants' houses on Long Street, improving the thermal performance of a stone-built home, extending a family house within the conservation area, or imagining something new in the landscape beyond, we would welcome the conversation.