What interests me about Upton St Leonards is the way the escarpment announces itself. You approach from the Gloucester side across open, low-lying ground, and then quite suddenly the Cotswold hills rise to the east, limestone breaking through the turf, and the village sits right at that threshold. It changes the architecture. St Peter's Grange, dating from the mid-fifteenth century, is built in coursed and squared limestone with a stone slate roof — materials quarried from the very hills behind it. Bowden Hall, built in 1770, uses brick with stucco facing, a construction that belongs to the vale rather than the uplands. Two buildings a few hundred metres apart, drawing on entirely different traditions, because the geology shifts beneath them. That kind of edge condition — where one landscape meets another — is exactly the sort of place where architecture has to pay attention, where design decisions carry consequences you can read in the finished building for centuries.
Award-winning Architects in Upton St Leonards
Why Clients Across Gloucestershire Trust Gresford Architects
I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006, and we now work with clients across the country from our Oxford studio. For a village where the Grade II* Church of St Leonard has stood since the late thirteenth century and St Peter's Grange carries centuries of careful adaptation, my membership of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings is not an abstract principle — it is how we approach every project. Old buildings deserve informed, careful attention, not well-meaning guesswork. In a village where St Peter's Grange has been adapted through at least six phases of building since the fifteenth century, and where the Grade II* Church of St Leonard has stood since the late thirteenth century, that understanding matters. We are members of the Passivhaus Trust and accredited with The Green Register, and our Passivhaus home The Deerings won a RIBA East Award in 2018. That same year I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the Building Design Awards. Features in Dezeen, The Modern House Journal, and Grand Designs Magazine reflect the range of work we deliver, from contemporary new builds to sensitive heritage projects. In 2025, I was invited to judge the British Homes Awards.
Architectural Services for Homes in Upton St Leonards
Renovations in Upton St Leonards demand an architect who understands what the existing fabric is telling you before proposing any change. St Peter's Grange is a masterclass in this — its coursed limestone walls, stone slate roof, and ashlar chimneys have absorbed additions from the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, further restorations in the 1870s and 1880s, and a twentieth-century phase in 1954, yet the building still reads as a coherent whole. That is what good renovation achieves: each intervention respects what came before while serving the needs of its own time. Whether the project involves a listed farmhouse like Valley Farmhouse or a later cottage on the village's lower ground, the starting point is always the same — understand the materials, the construction sequence, and the building's relationship with its setting before lifting a pencil. Stroud District Council will expect proposals in this part of the Cotswolds AONB to demonstrate that level of care.
EnerPHit, the Passivhaus Institute's standard for retrofit, is particularly well suited to the older building stock around Upton St Leonards. Many of the village's stone-built homes have solid walls that were never designed for thermal efficiency, and the exposed position at the foot of the escarpment — where cold air drains off the Cotswold plateau on still winter nights — makes heating costs a persistent concern. EnerPHit addresses this comprehensively, improving insulation, airtightness, and mechanical ventilation to deliver homes that are warmer, quieter, and dramatically cheaper to run. I have designed homes to Passivhaus standards and lived in one myself, so I understand from daily experience the difference between a home that merely meets regulations and one that genuinely performs. The challenge with stone buildings like those along the escarpment is doing this without destroying the breathability and moisture management that traditional construction relies on — it requires an architect who understands both the physics and the heritage.
Extension Design for homes in Upton St Leonards benefits from reading the existing building as carefully as the brief. The village has a varied building stock — Cotswold limestone in the older core, brick and render further from the escarpment, some mid-twentieth-century infill — and each material tradition has its own rhythm. A successful extension on a limestone cottage near the church needs a different response from one on a 1960s house closer to the Gloucester fringe. What matters is that the addition feels like a natural continuation of the home, not an interruption. Sustainable Design runs through all of this work — every project is designed to use energy and materials as efficiently as possible, to be comfortable and built to last, particularly relevant at the foot of the escarpment where exposure and heating costs make efficiency a daily concern rather than an abstract ambition.
For those considering a new home in the countryside around Upton St Leonards, PassivHaus Design offers a way to build something genuinely exceptional — homes that require almost no conventional heating while achieving outstanding comfort and air quality. New Build Design in this landscape, within the Cotswolds AONB, requires particular sensitivity to setting, and Stroud District Council will expect proposals that respond to the character of the escarpment and its surroundings. Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework provides a route for truly outstanding residential architecture in the open countryside, though it demands a design of exceptional quality that genuinely enhances its rural setting.
Upton St Leonards sits at one of those places where the landscape itself shapes what architecture should be. If you are planning a project here — a renovation, a retrofit, an extension, or something new — we would welcome a conversation about how to make it right.