A 17th-Century Cotswolds Rectory Gains a Pale Stone Extension

Architects at Prest Vale have added a new pale stone extension to a rectory in the Cotswolds, the hill country of south-central England. The building is Grade II listed, a status England's heritage system gives to buildings it considers worth protecting, which limits how owners can alter them.

The rectory was built in the 17th century as a home for a parish priest. It sits close to the Blenheim Estate in Oxfordshire, a large country estate in the same part of England. According to Dezeen, the architecture and design website that reported the project, the new work sits alongside the old house without competing with it.

The extension is a gabled volume, meaning it has a pitched roof that ends in a triangular wall at each end. It carries on the line of the existing roof, so the new section continues the outline of the original building. It is finished in local Cotswold stone, the warm, golden-grey stone used across the area for centuries. The windows and the gable end are picked out in white Portland stone, a pale limestone quarried on the Isle of Portland on England's south coast.

Crowning the new section is a stone sundial, a flat dial that tells the time from the sun's shadow.

The project also changed a neighbouring barn. The stone barn dates from the mid-18th century, and the architects turned it into a guest annexe, a separate building where visitors can stay. Keeping an old working building and giving it a new use is a common route for historic sites that need more space without building from scratch.

Prest Vale Architects' work is shared through its official website and Instagram account, where its projects are listed. The firm has not, in the material reported so far, said how much the work cost or when it was completed.

For visitors and neighbours, the change is easy to read from the outside. The house looks larger, but its roof and its stone still belong to the Cotswolds.