There is a particular quality to towns that were once wealthy and then quietly ceased to be. Wotton-under-Edge grew rich on the wool and cloth trade, and that prosperity left its mark in Cotswold stone — in the Grade I listed Church of St Mary the Virgin, consecrated in 1283 and largely rebuilt by 1325, with its fine six-stage tower and ashlar dressings; in the Hugh Perry Almshouses of 1638, endowed by a London merchant who never forgot where he came from; in the succession of Jacobean, Regency and Georgian houses that line the streets of the conservation area. When the cloth industry migrated to the larger mills at Stroud and Dursley, Wotton was left largely intact. The Victorian rebuilding that reshaped so many English market towns simply never arrived here. What you see instead is a town whose centre has barely changed since the early nineteenth century, sitting at the foot of the Cotswold escarpment with the long views and steep wooded combes of the Cotswolds National Landscape rising behind it. For an architect, that combination — layers of carefully made buildings in a landscape that demands respect — is as challenging as it is rewarding.
Award-winning Architects in Wotton-under-Edge
Trusted Architects for Homes in Wotton-under-Edge
I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006, and we are now based in Oxford, working with clients across the country. My training at the Mackintosh School of Architecture in Glasgow gave me a deep appreciation for how buildings sit within their context — the relationship between structure, material and place that defines whether a building belongs or merely occupies space. In a town like Wotton-under-Edge, where the conservation area was first designated in 1972 and has changed little since the cloth trade moved to Stroud, that understanding feels less like professional principle and more like practical necessity. I am a chartered RIBA architect and ARB registered, a member of the Passivhaus Trust and the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, and accredited with The Green Register. Our project The Deerings, a Passivhaus home in Hertfordshire, won the RIBA East Award in 2018. Our work has been featured in Dezeen, Grand Designs Magazine and The Modern House Journal. In 2025, I served as a judge for the British Homes Awards. What those projects share with work in Wotton-under-Edge is the insistence that conservation and performance are not competing goals — they are the same goal, approached from different angles.
How We Work with Homes in Wotton-under-Edge
Extension Design is one of our most rewarding areas of practice, and in Wotton-under-Edge the opportunities are shaped by the town's particular building stock. Many of the houses in the conservation area were built for the cloth merchants, dyers and weavers who powered the local economy — solidly constructed in Cotswold limestone, often with stone-tile roofs and timber-framed internal structures, but arranged around patterns of living that bear little resemblance to how families use their homes today. A rear extension or garden room can transform a house that feels beautiful but awkward into one that genuinely works, and the discipline of designing within a conservation area — where Stroud District Council expects proposals to respect the existing rooflines, materials and streetscape rhythm — tends to produce more thoughtful architecture, not less. The Hugh Perry Almshouses on Church Street, built in 1638 from a bequest of three hundred pounds, are a reminder that good architecture in Wotton-under-Edge has always been as much about how a building serves its occupants as how it presents itself to the street.
Renovations in Wotton-under-Edge often involve reading centuries of adaptation. Many of the houses in the historic core were built for the cloth merchants and weavers who sustained the local economy, and have been extended, subdivided and adapted across the centuries in ways that obscure their original character. The medieval street plan has barely changed since the industry relocated to Stroud, which means these houses carry evidence not just of changing fashions but of changing livelihoods. Good renovation work understands which changes were considered and which were expedient, and knows when to reveal earlier character and when to leave well alone. As a member of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, I approach historic fabric with care — the principle that repair is preferable to replacement, and that every intervention should be the minimum necessary to achieve the right result. In a town where the Cotswold stone has been quarried, cut and laid by local hands for seven centuries, that restraint matters.
EnerPHit is the Passivhaus Institute's certified retrofit standard, and it is particularly well suited to the solid Cotswold limestone that characterises homes in Wotton-under-Edge. These stone walls are handsome and durable — they have already lasted six, seven, sometimes eight centuries — but they were built when energy was cheap and draughts were accepted as part of winter. The escarpment that rises behind the town brings damp winds and early frosts, and many houses lose heat through their stone fabric at a rate that their owners feel acutely from November to March. EnerPHit offers a rigorous, measured route to transforming that performance — internal insulation carefully detailed to prevent interstitial condensation, mechanical ventilation with heat recovery, improved airtightness — all while preserving the external stone frontages that the conservation area protects. The result is a home that still presents itself to the street as it always has, but feels entirely different from the inside. I have lived in a home designed to Passivhaus standards, so the difference is not abstract to me: the stillness, the even warmth, the sense that the building is working quietly in your favour rather than against you.
Sustainable Design is the thread that connects everything we do at Gresford Architects. In Wotton-under-Edge, that principle goes back centuries. The town's builders chose Cotswold limestone because it was quarried on the hillside above the town — a stone durable enough to last through eight centuries of wool merchants and cloth workers. They oriented buildings to shelter from the westerlies that sweep across the escarpment. They understood, long before energy modelling existed, that a well-built stone house in a sheltered location performs better than a carelessly sited one. Modern sustainable design returns to those instincts, now informed by building physics and energy modelling rather than tradition alone. PassivHaus Design takes the principles to their most rigorous conclusion, delivering homes that need almost no conventional heating — an approach that makes particular sense where winters on the escarpment are cold and damp. New Build Design in the Wotton-under-Edge area must satisfy both Stroud District Council and the Cotswolds National Landscape designation, which together demand that new homes contribute positively to their setting. For sites in the rural landscape beyond the town, Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework offers a route to exceptional new homes where standard development would not normally be permitted — but only where the architecture is genuinely outstanding and sensitive to its context.
Wotton-under-Edge is a town where prosperity was turned into permanence — in stone almshouses, in a church whose organ was once played by Handel, in streets that have kept their shape for centuries because no one had reason to tear them down. Whether you are extending a home to suit the way your family lives now, renovating a building whose history deserves to be honoured, improving the thermal comfort of a house that was built before anyone measured heat loss, or planning something new in the Cotswold landscape, we would welcome the conversation.