Most Cotswold villages announce themselves through centuries of limestone — walls weathered to honey, rooflines sagging gently under stone slate. Upper Rissington does something different. Its streets carry names like Spitfire Place, Sopwith Road, and Avro Road, and they tell you exactly how this village came into being: not through wool or farming, but through the RAF. The married quarters built after 1945 for personnel at RAF Little Rissington were designed for function, not poetry — standardised homes arranged in neat terraces on one of the highest plateaux in the Cotswolds, 275 metres above sea level, with views that the original residents probably took for granted. When the Ministry of Defence sold the site in 1996, a military settlement began its slow transformation into a civilian community. That process of reinvention — taking buildings designed for one purpose and making them work beautifully for another — is one of the most interesting questions in architecture, and it is exactly the kind of work we love.
Award-winning Architects in Upper Rissington
An Award-winning Practice Working Across the Country
I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006, and we are now based in Oxford, working with clients across the country. We are RIBA chartered and ARB registered, with particular expertise in energy-efficient retrofit and Sustainable Design — two disciplines that matter enormously for the post-war housing stock that defines much of Upper Rissington. The Deerings in Hertfordshire, a certified Passivhaus new build, won the RIBA East Award in 2018 and demonstrated what rigorous energy performance looks like when it is treated as a design opportunity. I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the Building Design Awards that same year, and more recently served as a judge for the British Homes Awards in 2025. We are members of the Passivhaus Trust and accredited with The Green Register, and my wife Phoebe's work as a conservation architect has deepened the respect for existing buildings that runs through everything we do — whether those buildings are four hundred years old or eighty.
How We Work with Homes in Upper Rissington
Extension Design is where many projects in Upper Rissington begin. The former RAF married quarters were built to a compact, standardised plan — functional for their time, but often short on the space that families need today. Kitchens that were designed for a different era, living rooms that cannot quite accommodate how people actually use their homes, and a general sense that the buildings could give more than they currently do. Extending these homes well means understanding their structure, their proportions, and the setting they sit within. Upper Rissington lies within the Cotswolds National Landscape, and Cotswold District Council will expect any extension to respond thoughtfully to that context — not necessarily in Cotswold stone, but in materials and forms that sit comfortably on this high, open plateau. The best extensions do not simply add square footage; they rethink how a home flows, how light enters, and how the building meets its garden and the landscape beyond.
EnerPHit is the Passivhaus Institute's certified retrofit standard, and it is particularly relevant to the mid-twentieth-century construction found throughout Upper Rissington. Post-war homes of this type — solid-walled or early cavity construction, single-glazed or poorly sealed windows, minimal insulation — lose heat rapidly, and at 275 metres elevation the winters here are more exposed than in the valleys below. EnerPHit addresses this through a whole-building approach: improved insulation, high-performance glazing, airtightness detailing, and mechanical ventilation with heat recovery. The result is a home that stays warm without fighting the weather, with energy bills a fraction of what the original construction demands. For homes in Upper Rissington, where the building fabric was never designed for comfort in the way we now understand it, EnerPHit can be genuinely transformative.
Sustainable Design is the principle that ties all of our work together, from material selection and energy modelling to how a building responds to its site and the seasons. In Upper Rissington, where the Victory Fields development has brought 368 new homes to the eastern edge of the village, there is a real conversation to be had about what sustainable growth looks like in a Cotswolds setting — how new buildings can learn from the landscape without imitating a vernacular that was never part of this particular village's story. The mature trees planted by the station's first commanding officer, now protected, give the older parts of Upper Rissington a settled, green character that new development should learn from rather than ignore.
Renovations here often involve rethinking the internal layout of homes that were designed to a standard military plan rather than for the people who now live in them. Walls that once divided officers' quarters into regulation rooms can sometimes be opened up, circulation improved, and the relationship between inside and outside fundamentally changed. Whether on the Victory Fields development or elsewhere in Upper Rissington, New Build Design to certified PassivHaus standards delivers comfort that post-war housing stock simply cannot match — stable temperatures year-round, minimal energy demand, and an internal environment that responds precisely to how families actually live. And for the open countryside surrounding Upper Rissington — within the Cotswolds National Landscape — Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework provides a route for truly exceptional new homes whose design quality justifies their rural setting.
Upper Rissington is a village that has already reinvented itself once, from military base to family community. If you are thinking about the next chapter for your home here — an extension, a retrofit, or something entirely new — we would welcome the conversation.