There is something particularly satisfying about a village built from the stone beneath its own feet. In Winsley the Bath stone freestone quarried at Murhill — the same stone that was lowered by inclined tramway to the Kennet and Avon Canal and shipped to build Bristol Temple Meads station and the Avoncliff aqueduct — is also the material of the cottages, the garden walls, the church tower. Walk through Old Winsley and you see geology made architecture: warm, honey-coloured ashlar that was cut from the hillside and dressed by hand, a material so workable it could be sawn in any direction and so durable it has weathered two centuries of Avon valley rain with grace. For an architect who cares about the relationship between place, material and craft, Winsley is a village that repays close attention.
Award-winning Architects in Winsley
Why Clients in Winsley Trust Gresford Architects
Gresford Architects was founded in London in 2006 and is now based in Oxford, working with clients across the country. I am an ARB-registered and RIBA-chartered architect with a deep interest in how buildings perform — thermally, structurally, and as places to live. My membership of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings and accreditation on The Green Register reflect two commitments that are inseparable in practice: caring for historic fabric and designing for sustainability. In a village like Winsley, where the conservation area encompasses dozens of listed stone buildings and the surrounding landscape falls within both the Cotswolds National Landscape and the west Wiltshire Green Belt, those twin commitments matter. We won the RIBA East Award for The Deerings, a certified Passivhaus in Hertfordshire, and were shortlisted for a RIBA South Award for The Old Water Tower — projects that demonstrate the same balance of conservation sensitivity and environmental performance that work in Winsley demands. In 2018 I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the Building Design Awards, and more recently I served as a judge for the British Homes Awards in 2025. My wife Phoebe is a conservation architect, and her influence has sharpened my understanding of the careful, evidence-led approach that listed buildings and conservation settings require.
Architectural Services for Homes in Winsley
Renovations are the natural starting point for much of the work we would undertake in Winsley. The village's listed buildings — many of them Bath stone cottages from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, built by or for the quarrymen who worked the Murhill hillside — have thick solid walls, stone-mullioned windows and slate or stone tile roofs that demand a particular understanding if they are to be improved without damage. Lime mortar, breathable insulation, careful detailing around reveals and cills: these are not optional extras in a conservation village, they are the baseline. Wiltshire Council, as the local planning authority, applies close scrutiny to proposals within the conservation area, and rightly so. A well-prepared application that shows genuine understanding of a building's materials and history will always fare better than one that treats heritage as a hurdle to clear.
EnerPHit — the Passivhaus Institute's certified retrofit standard — offers a rigorous route to improving the thermal performance of older homes without compromising their character. Many of the stone properties in Winsley have solid walls that are beautiful but thermally inefficient, with single-glazed windows and uninsulated floors that leave their owners choosing between comfort and cost. EnerPHit works with the existing structure: internal insulation carefully detailed to avoid moisture risk, improved airtightness, and mechanical ventilation with heat recovery to maintain fresh air without losing warmth. Our EnerPHit retrofit of The Old Orchard in Oxfordshire, a timber-clad project featured in The Modern House Journal and The Spaces, demonstrated what is achievable when Passivhaus rigour meets genuine respect for an existing building. For a Bath stone cottage in Winsley, where the external walls are part of the village's visual identity and cannot simply be wrapped in external insulation, this kind of inside-out approach is essential.
Extension Design in Winsley presents a particular creative challenge. The older parts of the village are built in Bath stone ashlar with a consistency of scale and material that any extension must acknowledge, while the Tyning estate to the northeast and the Church Farm estate to the northwest — both twentieth-century additions in quite different materials — present their own design opportunities. Extending a stone cottage within the conservation area means understanding proportion, the depth of window reveals, how a roofline meets a gable, and the way new construction can be clearly of its time while sitting comfortably alongside what was built two hundred years ago. For the later housing stock, an extension is a chance to bring a home closer to the performance standards we would design into a new build — better insulation, more natural light, a stronger connection between inside and out.
Sustainable Design is the thread that runs through every service we offer. In Winsley, sustainability means choosing to retrofit a Bath stone cottage rather than demolish it, to insulate it carefully rather than wrap it in foam, to work with the valley's climate rather than fighting it. PassivHaus Design takes these principles to their most rigorous conclusion for new homes, achieving exceptional comfort through superinsulation, controlled airtightness and heat recovery ventilation — a standard we know well from The Deerings and from living in a Passivhaus home ourselves. New Build Design on any sites that come forward within or near the village — constrained as they are by both the Green Belt and the national landscape designation — must demonstrate design quality that justifies development in a sensitive location. And in the open countryside around Winsley, where the Avon valley drops steeply from the plateau towards Avoncliff and Limpley Stoke, Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework provides a route for homes of outstanding architectural quality in locations where standard planning policy would not normally permit development.
If you are considering a project in Winsley — whether renovating a Bath stone cottage, extending a home on the plateau, or exploring what might be possible in the Avon valley landscape — we would welcome the conversation.