You can read a village's story in its materials. At the Church of St Mary Magdalene in Twyning — a Grade II* listed building with twelfth-century origins — the engaged columns of the chancel arch are built from alternating blocks of green sandstone and limestone, two local stones laid side by side, each with its own colour and grain, working together to hold the weight above. It is a small detail, easily missed, but it tells you something fundamental about this place. Twyning sits between the Avon and the Severn, and its Old English name means exactly that — a place between rivers. That in-between quality runs through everything here, from the two distinct halves of the village, Church End and Twyning Green, to the buildings themselves, which shift from timber framing to brick to stone as you move through the parish. For an architect, a village with this kind of layered material character is endlessly interesting to work in, because every project has to reckon with what came before.
Award-winning Architects in Twyning
Why Clients Across the Country Trust Gresford
Gresford Architects was founded in London in 2006 and is now based in Oxford, working with clients nationwide. My membership of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings has shaped how I think about older structures — not as museum pieces but as living buildings that have already adapted many times and deserve to go on adapting. We are members of the Passivhaus Trust and accredited with The Green Register, because sustainability and heritage are not opposites; they are two halves of the same commitment to making buildings that last. Our work on The Deerings, a Passivhaus home in Hertfordshire, won the RIBA East Award in 2018, and The Great Barn in Buckinghamshire — a Grade II listed barn restoration — reflects the same care we bring to historic fabric. That combination of rigorous energy performance and deep respect for existing buildings is at the heart of what we do.
Architectural Services for Homes in Twyning
Renovations in Twyning often begin with the question of what the building is actually made of, and the answer is rarely simple. Freeman's Court, a Grade II listed house near Church End, has a seventeenth-century core of square-panelled timber framing with rendered infill, extended in the eighteenth century in brick — a single building that spans two construction traditions. Unlocking the potential of a house like this, or any of the older properties in Twyning's conservation area at Church End, requires understanding how timber, render, brick, and stone each behave differently under load, moisture, and the passage of time. That is the kind of patient, technically informed renovation work we are drawn to — reading the building before reaching for the pencil.
EnerPHit, the Passivhaus Institute's standard for retrofit, is particularly well suited to the older housing stock in Twyning, where solid-walled cottages and timber-framed buildings present thermal challenges that conventional insulation approaches can make worse. An EnerPHit retrofit works with the existing structure — improving airtightness, adding carefully detailed insulation, and introducing mechanical ventilation with heat recovery — so that the building becomes warmer, quieter, and far less expensive to heat without sacrificing the character that makes it worth preserving. In a village where the building materials shift from green sandstone to timber to brick within a few hundred metres, each retrofit demands its own specific strategy, informed by what the walls are made of and how they were built to breathe.
Extension Design for homes in Twyning calls for an honest response to the existing building and its setting. The village sits along the Avon, with views across the river to open farmland, and an extension that works well here will respect both the scale of the building it joins and the wider landscape it sits within. Church End's conservation area status means that any extension within its boundary will need to satisfy Tewkesbury Borough Council that the design preserves or enhances the character of the area — and rightly so. The best extensions are those where the new work feels inevitable, as though the building was always meant to grow in that direction. Whether the host building is a timber-framed cottage or a later Victorian house, the proportions, materials, and roofline of the extension must be in genuine conversation with what already exists.
Sustainable Design runs through every service we offer, but it takes on particular meaning in a village that adopted its Neighbourhood Development Plan in 2018 with a ninety-six per cent vote in favour — a community that clearly cares about how this place evolves. New Build Design in Twyning must respond to that community voice, and to the physical grain of the parish — its river-edge setting, the pattern of its lanes, the shift from timber to brick to stone that marks the different periods of the village's growth. PassivHaus Design offers the most rigorous framework we know for new homes that will outlast their immediate context: homes that are so thermally efficient they remain comfortable even as energy becomes scarcer and more expensive. For the open countryside around Twyning, where the Avon and the Severn have carved a valley with long views across open farmland, Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework provides a route for exceptional residential architecture in rural settings — though any new building will inevitably be visible across that broad landscape, making the quality of its design and its relationship to the wider topography particularly important.
Twyning is a village whose buildings tell a story of adaptation — timber giving way to brick, stone meeting render, each generation adding to what the last left behind. If you are planning a project here, whether it is a renovation, a retrofit, an extension, or something entirely new, we would welcome the chance to talk about how to do it well.