Step inside St Bartholomew's in Yarnton and you are looking at nine centuries of architecture gathered into a single building. Norman window reveals from around 1100 sit within walls rebuilt in the thirteenth century. Above the chancel arch, the faded outline of a fifteenth-century Nativity survives in the plaster. Then, in 1611, Sir Thomas Spencer added the chapel that bears his family's name — and filled its windows with heraldic glass that remains the largest collection of early seventeenth-century heraldic stained glass in Oxfordshire. Two centuries later, William Fletcher gathered medieval glass fragments from across the county and set them into the nave windows, creating something no single era could have produced alone. I find that idea compelling: that the best buildings are not fixed in one moment but accumulate meaning over time, each generation adding something considered and careful to what came before. That is the kind of architecture we practise.
Award-winning Architects in Yarnton
Why Homes in Yarnton Need an Architect Who Reads the Layers
I founded Gresford Architects in London in 2006 and later moved the practice to Oxford, where we work from the Eco Centre in Osney Mead — just a few miles from Yarnton. A village with a Grade I listed church, a Grade II* Jacobean manor house, and several further listed buildings along its lanes is a place where every project touches history in some form. But Yarnton is also a village facing significant change: Cherwell District Council's Local Plan includes large-scale housing allocations in and around the parish, bringing thousands of new homes to what has been, for centuries, a quiet settlement on the edge of the Green Belt. Working here means understanding both what must be protected and what the village is becoming.
We bring that dual understanding. I am RIBA Chartered and ARB Registered, a member of SPAB, the Passivhaus Trust and The Green Register. Our RIBA East Award for The Deerings — a certified Passivhaus in Hertfordshire — demonstrated that energy performance and architectural quality are not competing ambitions. The Old Water Tower, shortlisted for a RIBA South Award, showed how a heritage structure can be sensitively reimagined. I was a finalist for Sustainability Architect of the Year at the 2018 Building Design Awards and a judge at the British Homes Awards in 2025. That range of experience matters in a village like Yarnton, where the next decade will demand architects who can work with equal confidence on a listed limestone cottage and a contemporary family home on newly allocated land.
How We Work With Yarnton's Heritage and Growth
Yarnton falls under Cherwell District Council for planning, and the village's listed buildings and its relationship with the surrounding Green Belt shape what is possible here. The older properties — built from the coursed rubble limestone that characterises much of this part of Oxfordshire — demand an architect who understands both the material and the regulatory context. Extension Design is where we often begin for homeowners in Yarnton. The village's period properties, many of them seventeenth and eighteenth-century stone buildings like Hill Farm and the former Red Lion, were built for a different pattern of life. An extension that respects their proportions, materials and rooflines can transform how a family uses their home without compromising the character that makes it worth living in. We design extensions that feel as though they have always belonged — continuing the logic of the original building rather than interrupting it.
Renovations follow a similar philosophy. My membership of SPAB informs how we approach older buildings: understanding how limestone walls breathe, how lime mortar performs over decades, and why well-intentioned but poorly specified modern interventions can do more harm than good. In Yarnton, where some buildings have stood for three or four centuries, the aim is to work with the building's own logic — improving comfort, light and spatial flow while respecting the construction methods that have proven themselves over generations.
For the older stone properties in Yarnton, EnerPHit offers a rigorous retrofit pathway. Solid limestone walls cannot take conventional cavity insulation, so EnerPHit coordinates internal or external insulation, airtightness, mechanical ventilation with heat recovery and high-performance glazing into a whole-building strategy. The result is a home that is warm, quiet and economical to run — without trapping moisture in the very walls that give it its character. Sustainable Design underpins every project we take on, not as an add-on but as a founding principle. We design homes that are comfortable, durable and use energy and materials as efficiently as possible.
Yarnton's growth also creates opportunities. For those building on newly allocated sites, New Build Design and PassivHaus Design allow us to design homes to the highest energy performance standards from the outset — certified comfort with minimal running costs and a fabric-first approach that will outlast any technology cycle. And in the open countryside beyond the village, Paragraph 84 of the National Planning Policy Framework permits outstanding or innovative homes in rural locations where the design genuinely enhances its setting. The countryside around Yarnton, where the parish boundary extends into agricultural land between the village and the A44, may suit this route for the right project.
If you are considering an extension, renovation or new build in Yarnton, I would welcome the chance to talk. This is a village that has always known how to absorb change thoughtfully — from Norman masons to Jacobean builders to William Fletcher's careful gathering of medieval glass — and that spirit of considered addition is one we share.