Sandford House Restoration Home

Historic houses both humble and ground

have all played their part in the story of our nation

but today, many are at risk

and some in danger of being lost forever.

I am going to be following the fortunes of six properties

all facing their own struggle for survival.

Look you can see the round.

It is like walking into a kind of Tudor fantasy.

This is not quite what I was expecting.

And they all have new owners

committed to turning them into their dream home.

It like a little old lady waiting for her facelift.

We are coming in to make her better.

I never ever thought that I would do a project like this in my life before.

I have spent years restoring derelict old properties

and having poured everything into trying to create

my perfect family home I know what a challenge it is

to rescue a precious old building.

There is a lot riding on it and it is scary times.

We love it and we want to finish it but sometimes it just feels like too much.

It's Restoration Home.

Standing in the shadow of this magnificent building,

it will come as no surprise that I am in Scotland.

And if you are passionate about saving a piece of heritage

in this part of the world, this is the sort of thing

you would probably be looking for something rugged and imposing,

something that dominates the entire landscape.

But that is not for everyone.

We have found a couple of Scottish bravehearts

who are committed to saving a very different sort of building,

a house that, despite nestling in this amazing Scottish countryside,

is quintessentially English.

It is built in the most perfect styles, the Arts and Crafts,

but is a it is a long time since this poor house

has seen anything like perfection.

This is Sandford House in Newport-on-Tay, Fife,

one of only two houses in Scotland

designed by the Arts and Crafts architect Baillie Scott.

Dating back to 1902, it was built as a family home,

but it's spent nearly half its life as a three-star hotel.

Now, abandoned as a business for years,

the place has fallen into serious disrepair and decay.

Sandford House is a Category B historic property,

the second-highest listing for buildings at risk in Scotland.

What it needs is new owners with determination,

deep pockets and a lot of love to give.

Meet Ralph Webster and Evelyn Hardie,

the couple who plan to restore Sandford House

and make it their home.

Ralph and Evelyn met and fell for each other 16 years ago,

when Evelyn was selling her car.

I put it in the paper to advertise it for sale

and Ralph came down to visit with a friend of his

who was wanting to buy a car and they bought the car

and then a couple of weeks later I got a phone call

and I thought "Oh, no, there's something gone wrong with this car,"

but he was actually phoning to ask me out, so the rest is history.

Yeah, exactly.

They paid £560,000 to buy Sandford House,

a building they've known for years.

I felt sorry for it

because it was our local pub and we used to come up

10, 12 of us and just completely fill the place and it was fantastic.

and it just sort of went downhill you know

and it just is such a shame that it hadn't been maintained

to a high standard over the years.

Ralph is 59, and works at sea as a marine consultant.

Evelyn ten years younger - has her own graphic design company.

Both keen DIY-ers,

they leapt at the chance of tackling a full-scale restoration.

I just thought it was amazing, it's an amazing building.

I mean it was a mess and it needed an awful lot of work done to it,

you could see right away how you could turn it into something absolutely fantastic.

Part of the house is built into a rocky cliff

creating a sunken lounge

with a spectacular bay window on the south side of the building.

This'll be an amazing room when it's all finished,

it'll be a sort of formal lounge, I suppose, really.

One of the most interesting things of all are these swans.

The window fasteners have got swans on them.

You can see how damp it is in here just now, look at the condensation on the inside of the windows,

we need to get some heating into the place, basically.

All the rooms on the ground floor we want to sort of try and get them liveable so we can actually move in.

Because they've bought a Category B listed building,

Ralph and Evelyn have a responsibility to safeguard

the special architectural character of their Arts and Crafts house.

At the time of purchase, they had to submit

their detailed restoration plans to the local council

and the statutory heritage body, Historic Scotland.

They've been given listed building consent

for the work they want to do.

Over a year and a half,

they plan to restore the rooms in the main wing of the house,

which will be their home...

...the sunken lounge, living room and kitchen on the ground floor

and three bedrooms and two attic rooms above.

Behind, a central courtyard is surrounded

by two other wings which once housed

the kitchen and bedrooms of the hotel.

Ralph and Evelyn plan to convert this part

to provide extra income.

The intent is to have four, four holiday homes, two storey here,

two storey in the middle and two flats

and the income from that will help do the, you know,

the repairs over the years.

Sandford House also came with four-and-a-half acres of land,

some of which they plan to sell to help fund the restoration.

In October 2010,

Ralph and Evelyn started their dream restoration in earnest.

It's a challenge,

it really is, it's a serious challenge.

If you actually come in here

and achieve something at the end of the day

and you actually get this house

back to looking like an Arts and Crafts house that'll be amazing.

And because there are only two of them in Scotland,

you know, to actually repair this one properly,

there are things we won't be able to do in our lifetime...

but it'll go on and someone'll do it in the future, hopefully.

They've set themselves a restoration budget of £530,000 -

£270,000 to restore the original house as their home

and another £260,000 to convert part of the building into holiday homes.

And that's where they're camping out

until the main house is ready to move into.

They'll be doing a lot of the basic work themselves,

with a small group of skilled craftsmen

they can call on as and when required.

They're all local lads and they all know each other and they know me

and they know we want a good job done, so, you know,

we all sort of club together and get on with it.

As far as the physical work's concerned,

try and keep the costs down and if a wall's got to come down

I'll just get a chisel out and knock it down.

You just get at it.

Ralph can spend up to a month at a time away.

But he uses every spare moment on the restoration,

sandblasting away the black paint

that covered most of the building's oak woodwork when it was a hotel.

We've also sandblasted the beams,

oak beams and all the window frames,

the window frames are more difficult because we had to mask them all off

and then sandblast them and varnish them.

Come and see what I have found under here.

That's brilliant. Look at that.

-Why do people cover these up?

-Common. Slabs.

Stone underneath here.

'As they start to bring their early 20th century building back to life,

'Ralph and Evelyn see themselves as custodians of Sandford House

'for generations to come.'

It would be nice to find out how the interior of the house would have looked in those days.

Once you've got the history you can add us on to it

then it can be passed on to future owners

otherwise the history is lost.

I mean we've searched but there's a few dead ends

that I'm sure you're going to manage to help us, you know,

get a wee bit further down the road than we have.

'As the restoration begins, so does our historical investigation.'

Historian Dr Kate Williams

will scour the archives for information

about the first owner of Sandford House.

Our architectural expert, Kieran Long,

starts his investigation at the house itself.

This is a building from a moment in British architecture which was just so important.

The Arts and Crafts style was something

that celebrated the work of the craftsman and you have to remember

this was at a period towards the end of the 19th century

when the Victorian era had brought, you know, so much mechanisation and industrial production

and there were a group of people who stood back and said, "No, this isn't what we want,

"we need to feel the hand of the craftsman on the material."

So many of the houses of this period,

of the Arts and Crafts style,

they fell out of fashion quite quickly in the early 20th century.

Some of them have been lost, some of them have not been restored

and this is an amazing survival, to me,

that looks ripe for bringing back to its former glory.

The Arts and Crafts style flourished in the decades

leading up to the First World War.

Its rebellion against industrial mass production

often harked back to a vision of England in the Middle Ages.

This is a nice little cosy moment we have here

of different kind of levels of building different rooms interconnecting.

What is, you know, not a particularly fine or grand little staircase

but it does bring some of that higgledy-piggledy

kind of medieval atmosphere to the place.

The living room reflects the same homely, handcrafted style.

You have this incredibly characteristic inglenook fireplace here

which is absolutely something redolent of the Arts and Crafts,

this beautiful brickwork

with thin, thin mortar joints,

carefully, but unfussily, made.

The origins of the Arts and Crafts movement were over 400 miles away

from Ralph and Evelyn's house in Scotland,

beside the River Thames in West London.

This was the home of William Morris, who was the godfather,

intellectually and creatively,

of the whole of the Arts and Crafts movement.

This place we are in now was a coaching house,

which Morris filled with looms

and people were knotting carpet

and making things in the basement. There was a press.

All of those different kinds of industries,

some of which he was reviving and inventing, happened here.

William Morris's back-to-nature cottage industry designs

predated Ralph and Evelyn's Arts and Crafts house by 40 years.

The experiments that Morris was carrying out here with his press,

with his wallpapers, with his textiles,

things that were being made here, lead to a kind of mature style

that Sandford House displays in its architecture and would certainly

have displayed in its fittings and textiles and furniture and so on.

Just along the river from William Morris's house,

you can get a real sense of how his style influenced

the interior of an Arts and Crafts home.

This is where Morris's friend Emery Walker lived and these rooms

are almost exactly as he left them when he died nearly 80 years ago.

It's like a kind of time-capsule here.

It's like walking into an interior that hasn't changed since the '30s.

And was, of course, conceived much earlier so it's as if

we're in the a late-Victorian, early 20th century drawing room.

Early 20th century photographs of the sunken lounge

at Sandford House show how the rooms were once furnished.

Today the original furniture is long gone and Ralph and Evelyn

have begun to restore the surviving Arts and Crafts decor.

It's kind of a quite rough, almost naive style.

It has that air of the medieval about it.

Certainly the air of something hand-made.

But the building's 48 years as a three-star hotel

does have a very visible legacy.

There is nothing that messes up a beautifully composed facade

more than a pipe full of human waste, you know,

coming out of a bathroom somewhere.

It's just an absolute disgrace that this facade has been

disfigured by this and sometimes it slides into the background

but my first thought on seeing these things is, "Honestly! That pipe!"

And we have another example just up here too, of a,

of an extractor fan, you know, in where a tiny little window

would probably light something picturesque behind it

and they thought, "We'll get rid of that."

Put an extractor fan in at some point.

This is really, really clumsy treatment of a beautiful building.

Kieran works out that the small window originally

would have cast extra light on the inglenook fireplace in the lounge.

Once they take that out, it's going to be so great.

This tiny little window would bring such effect to this beautiful

fireplace because it would light it indirectly.

You won't see where the light's coming from.

You'll just get a warm glow from one side of this hearth-like range.

You know, it's so typical Arts and Crafts,

that dramatisation of something very homely.

Seeing the house has whetted Kieran's appetite

for the work of Arts and Crafts architect, Baillie Scott.

Not one of the big names of early 20th century

and late 19th century architecture and so for me,

we need to discover a lot more about this man.

'Ralph and Evelyn have been getting stuck into the renovation

'for over six months and I'm paying them my first visit.'

-Hello. I'm Caroline.

-Hello. Nice to meet you.

-Evelyn.

'I learned from my own restoration experience,

'those early stages of scraping, sand blasting and demolition

'are often the hardest.'

-Are you still in love with it?

-Definitely. 100%.

-Oh, yeah.

-Even more so as time goes on.

-Really?

-I think so.

The more you are here, you know,

-the more you get sort of attached to it, I suppose.

-Sucked in.

What was the Hotel's main entrance of the courtyard

will become Ralph and Evelyn's front door.

It will be the way into the main wing of their home,

where work is under way on the sunken lounge and the living room.

-OK, Caroline. This is the hall, here.

-Yes.

-And through here we have got the public bar.

-The public bar.

-Yes.

'What's going to be their living room used to be the hotel bar.

'And where beers and cocktails were once served,

'the Arts and Crafts inglenook fireplace has now been revealed.

'Ralph has known this room since he was a teenager.'

We all came up, 14 of us came up together

and just grew up and did a bit of courting, et cetera.

SHE LAUGHS Long before you were on the scene.

So this would be the place you bring a hot date to?

"I want to impress her, I'll take her up to the house!"

Unless we didn't want the locals to know about her

and then we wouldn't come here.

But once everything got going,

you can introduce her to the rest of the kin, as it were.

THEY LAUGH

It's not just inside the house that they've uncovered clues

to how it looked in the past.

At the bottom of the cliff below the sunken lounge is a pond.

It was about 15ft of ivy out from the edge and I had to climb up

and down the rock face, removing it.

You couldn't even see the rock face.

We are a bit concerned about the pond because it's been fed by the urinals from the men's.

The gents. The plastic pipe went straight out and in the pond.

'I continue my tour of the ground-floor rooms.

'Next door to the main wing, Ralph and Evelyn are planning

'to reclaim the hotel's old kitchen area as part of their home.

'Hardly changed since the hotel ceased trading in 2007,

'these fixtures and fittings

'couldn't be further from Arts and Crafts.'

When we bought it, it had at least an inch and a half of...

-This is where the grease was all over.

-Grease and dead mice.

This is a hotel kitchen, basically.

And what is this going to be for you?

We're going to put a dividing wall up here.

This will be your utility room.

Utility room will be that side and from that side to there,

it will be a sort of workshop type toy room for Ralph.

-Extension to the garage.

-You've really got it made, haven't you?

And then we move into this part of the house

and there is clearly loads still to do here.

-Daunted?

-No, not at all.

-No?

-No, no. No, no.

'Today, one of the ugliest relics of the hotel,

the industrial-sized extractor unit,

is going to meet its fate, with the help of Ralph's friend, Dave.

You look really happy. What are you doing?

We are going to destroy this vent later. Dying to get rid of it.

-It's time to get rid of it?

-Yes.

-I just hope it doesn't go through the kitchen window.

-Yeah. Let's hope not.

But it's a bit too narrow to put scaffolding up

so we will just give it a go, if that's all right.

Yeah, give it a yank.

Are you OK?

They're so keen to get rid of the thing

they are being a bit gung-ho with this rapid demolition.

Perfect.

Right, ready?

Ooh.

Dave? What do you think about Ralph taking on this project?

-I think it's very brave. Very brave indeed.

-Do you?

-Because you've known this building a long time, haven't you?

-I have, yes.

I used to come up here for drinks every so often.

Did you? Have you been mates since you were young?

-Yes, since we were teenagers, I would say.

-Ah.

-Yes, uh-huh.

We were in the Boy Scouts and suchlike.

-Were you really in Boy Scouts together?

-Sadly, yes.

-How long do you think it'll take them till they're finished?

-SHE LAUGHS

Known as the Sandford Hill Hotel in the mid-1960s,

this original menu shows the type of meals being produced in the old kitchen.

Sole mornay followed by roast duckling in orange sauce

and coupe Singapore.

Guests would enjoy these culinary delights

in the dining room next door,

a room Ralph and Evelyn are in the process of transforming.

So this is going to be your lovely, lovely kitchen?

This is going to be our kitchen.

This is where you'll be cooking and eating, or just cooking?

This part will be the dining room - well, the dining area -

so there'll be a table and chairs here and there's going to be...

We've still to knock a hole in the wall there

because there's going to be a door out into the garden there,

and the other side, that'll be the kitchen.

We've got a great big island unit that goes all the way out here.

Is it important for you to get the detail right?

To get the design of the house right,

to get everything right here?

Yeah, the intention is to get it as correct as we can, you know,

basically regardless of cost. I mean, there is a limited budget, obviously,

and we're probably way over it already, but you know...

Yeah, if we're going to repair something, we might as well do it properly.

And is that, is that for your sense of achievement

or is it something you feel you owe the building?

Yeah, the building deserves it. The building really deserves it.

As I say, it was abandoned for three-and-a-half years

and the state it was in then, you know?

And we intend just to return it to a liveable home

with a bit of history to it.

Historian Kate is on the trail of the first owner of Sandford house.

To learn who commissioned Evelyn and Ralph's Arts and Crafts home in 1902,

she's come to Dundee, three miles away across the River Tay.

At the start of the 20th century,

this Scottish waterside city was booming.

Dundee in the Victorian era was incredibly wealthy.

It was a big, bustling metropolis

and a really important industrial area.

The money that built Sandford house came from a thriving new industry:

photography.

And this is the man whose money it was -

Harben Valentine.

His family firm were photographers by appointment to Queen Victoria.

The Valentines were pioneers of commercial photography

and one of the first companies to market the picture postcard.

I've got a marvellous one here of New Zealand.

Very few Victorians could ever get to New Zealand,

but they could still look at the photos.

And what's also marvellous is I've got this picture here

of Queen Victoria, because the Valentines became

the photographer to the Queen.

The Valentines' standing grew further in 1879.

Their photographs were used by the official enquiry

into the Tay Bridge disaster.

Over 70 lives were lost when the bridge collapsed in a winter storm

and a passing passenger train plunged into the waters below.

The fact they were entrusted with this key part of the enquiry,

of taking the photos, shows how important that family had become.

Their photographs became crucial to the memory

of so many people in Dundee. They were iconic,

and they were the images of the Tay Bridge that people never forgot.

Harben Valentine and his family

lived at Sandford house until the 1930s.

By then, he'd turned his photographic company

into a worldwide business with offices on four continents.

Morag Henderson is Harben Valentine's grand-daughter.

It was a good part of the country for him

because he could commute to Dundee

either by train or on the old ferryboat,

which was called the Fifey, and there he raised the family.

I remember the window latches with the black swans,

which my grandfather said was an old Valentine tradition.

He was jolly, very good at entertaining children.

I remember him at the end of every lunch,

getting out the monkey finger puppet and playing with it.

I sit opposite him when I have my breakfast, where you're sitting,

and if you stare really long at him, he occasionally just smiles.

Morag is delighted her grandfather's house might now be saved.

There just have been too many houses in Scotland that have crumbled away

since the war, been demolished or let go into ruin,

that I think that the fact that Sandford is being restored is great.

To bring Harben Valentine's home back to life,

Ralph and Evelyn started out with a budget of £270,000.

But one element of the building's Arts and Crafts design

is starting to eat money.

Evelyn and Ralph's house has over 700 small pains

of leaded glass on the main facade alone.

There are another 540 in the tall bay window in the sunken lounge.

The whole building has thousands of panes of glass set in lead.

They're one of the biggest restoration challenges of all.

If the lead gets cracked in the joins

it's very difficult to repair them and make them watertight again.

If one has gone and there's quite a few cracks in it

and also a broken bit of glass or whatever,

we've ended up just replacing the whole thing

because it is actually easier and it looks better

and, at the end of the day,

should last longer than if it was just repaired.

Evelyn and Ralph budgeted just £10,000 for windows

but they've already spent double that, and the figure's rising.

They've been relying on the expert work of specialist restorer,

Liz Rowley, who is familiar with the problems of ageing leaded glass.

The windows in Sandford House are about 100 years old,

but quite a lot of them were openable windows.

Opening windows are the kind of leadwork

that goes first in a building.

Crucial to the strength of the leaded window are rigid metal bars

tied to the lead to provide extra support.

But, repeated opening of the window eventually takes its toll.

First thing that happens

is that the ties start to come loose from the bars.

Then, the window starts to rattle against the bars

as it's opened and closed.

Also, the lead joints start to tear, where the ties are attached

and that combination starts to weaken the whole structure of the window.

We've releaded all the opening windows in Sandford House.

Restoring the windows involves a combination of skills and materials

that would have been celebrated by the Arts and Crafts movement.

This square of glass is called a quarry

and there are equal numbers of quarries running up this window

and I'm going to just slot them into the groove in the lead,

it's like a letter H,

and the glass slots into the groove along the edge of the lead.

I need to make sure that all these horizontal leads are the same size,

or else my window will start to get distorted.

The process of sealing the lead joints

involves the use of tallow, a rendered animal fat

traditionally used in the making of candles and soap.

The tallow allows Liz to create what's known as a flux.

Flux allows the solder to flow over the joint,

and it's a greasing material

and it melts with the heat of the soldering iron

and creates a surface tension that pulls the solder along.

Back at Sandford House, Liz ties the finished lead panels

to their supporting bars.

Restoring the windows might be costing

a lot more than they bargained for,

but Ralph and Evelyn want to do it for the sake of the building.

If you've got an Arts and Crafts house, it would be sacrilege,

I suppose, to replace that with a modern, double glazed unit.

You wouldn't even consider doing that. It would look terrible.

Architectural expert, Kieran, is learning more

about the Arts and Crafts architect

who designed Ralph and Evelyn's building -

Mackay Baillie Scott.

With the kind of elements that we see at Sandford House that seem

so characteristic of his work, the inglenook fireplace,

the windows, the great pitched roofs and so on, what did they mean to him?

What was he trying to achieve?

Born in 1865, when the Arts and Crafts movement

was in its infancy, Baillie Scott designed nearly 300 buildings

between the late Victorian era and the eve of the Second World War.

In 1902, he would have been a fashionable choice of architect

for Dundee photography magnate, Harben Valentine.

It might have been word-of-mouth, it might have been through friends.

I imagine it was probably something that was suggested to him

when he went to London to buy art for reproduction.

And Baillie Scott took up the commission.

In the library of the Royal Institute of British Architects,

Kieran discovers the house Baillie Scott first built for Valentine,

in 1902, looked very different.

It was called Sandford Cottage and had a thatched roof.

It says here, "This little house was built in Scotland in a district

"where thatching with reeds was still understood,

"and so this method of roofing was adopted."

But, less than 10 years after it was built, disaster struck.

We found these extraordinary pictures of a conflagration,

a blaze that has destroyed this beautiful thatched cottage.

In this picture we see the roof completely disappeared,

a kind of ruin shrouded in smoke.

Harben Valentine commissioned Baillie Scott

to rebuild his home in 1912.

The shape of the exterior was drastically altered,

but the architect had developed his own trademark interior style.

To find out what inspired the designer,

Kieran has travelled to the Isle of Man,

where Baillie Scott spent his early career in the late 1800s.

He designed an Arts and Crafts police station here

and several other buildings, as well as his own home.

It's Mock Tudor on the outside.

Inside, the design is instantly recognisable.

We're standing in the space with this amazing fireplace

which has so many parallels with Sandford.

It is exciting to be here

because this is a house that Baillie Scott designed for himself

and that always tells you a lot about an architect.

They get to experiment and try out the things that clients

have perhaps not let them experiment with yet.

And, most importantly for me,

and most interestingly, this lovely window, kind of concealed window

that just allows indirect light into the fireplace.

The layout of the inglenook fireplace is almost identical

to the one in Ralph and Evelyn's living room,

where the concealed window has been replaced by a hotel extractor fan.

Back on the English mainland, Kieran finds a big clue

to Baillie Scott's redesign of the exterior of Sandford House

after the original thatched cottage was destroyed by fire.

This is Greyfriars House in Surrey,

the work of architect Charles Voysey in 1896.

It's just so exciting to be here

in front of one of Charles Voysey's greatest works.

Charles Voysey, one of the greatest architects

of the end of the 19th century, an Arts and Crafts architect,

and somebody who's a contemporary of Baillie Scott's,

but if you like, the superstar of that generation,

who was really associated with this style from the late 19th century.

It's easy to believe that either Baillie Scott or his client,

Harben Valentine, had this Charles Voysey building in mind

when they rebuilt Sandford House in 1912.

We have exactly the same thing at Sandford -

the facade that faces the landscape downhill

has this incredibly graphical quality of this large, deep gable.

The DNA of Sandford House is somewhere here

in these deep Voyseyan gables.

He might not have been the Arts and Crafts superstar that Voysey was

but Baillie Scott's very English Arts and Crafts designs

were appreciated by one of

the 20th century's most celebrated architectural commentators.

His friend, John Betjeman.

They came together around things that they both loved -

that's the British countryside, British craftsmanship,

the kind of Merrie England vision of small villages and so on.

You can imagine that their dinners together were very pleasant.

Sandford House is one of those buildings that demonstrates

the full range of Baillie Scott's career.

You really understand how it fits with that landscape,

something that Betjeman loved.

By the First World War,

Arts and Crafts architecture had already seen its heyday.

The 1920s and 30s saw a decline in the number of British craftsmen

and a return to mass production.

And ironically,

one very English architectural style that Baillie Scott himself favoured,

decades earlier, was now starting to pop up everywhere -

Mock Tudor.

Mock Tudor was the antithesis of what he was looking for in architecture.

He wanted an architecture of craft and fineness

and this is just mass-produced housing rolled across the suburbs,

but I still believe there is a link.

I still think there is a dream of the Merrie England

shared by Baillie Scott and by this kind of suburban housing.

It's something in us, us British,

we always want to look backwards to a time of British villages.

There is still a dream of something else,

of a better British past, somehow,

that this building and Sandford House encapsulate in their architecture.

Put it over on the wall on the right-hand side of the door.

It's now almost a year since Evelyn and Ralph began their restoration.

The original budget,

to turn the main part of the building into their home,

was £270,000.

They've spent nearly all of it already.

She does worry me when she tells me

we've spent over 250,000 since we bought it.

And we haven't even started on the holiday homes yet!

That seems to be connected to those pipes.

But they remain undaunted.

Maybe have to leave that bit just now...

We just needed to do it. It was so unloved for so long.

We will just use every penny we've got

and keep going as long as we can.

-Is this going on the bonfire?

-Yes.

Ralph and Evelyn's plasterer, John,

has the job of recreating the work of Sandford's original craftsmen.

Throughout the house,

plaster corners are rounded off in what are known as bull-nosed curves.

What I had to do was get this tool made up from a welder.

I've taken the template off this corner.

You run that up and it forms it, just at the same time.

It needed to be taken back to what the original building was,

you know, and keep the shape of what it was.

We want to try and keep it the traditional, old way.

The most challenging plastering job is in the sunken lounge.

John is applying the final layer

to one of the largest walls in the house

and, suddenly, there's a problem.

The plaster has started to come away.

It is a nightmare for all of them.

He put the first skim on and it was dried,

and it felt solid and it looks as though it's going to be good,

and he put the finishing coat on today

but when he put the bonding coat on, it soaked in

and the plaster just fell off.

The problem seems to be the original wallcovering,

which contains hidden layers of paint and paper.

They've put a line through there.

That's what I'm thinking.

Some people have applied paints that are probably oil paints

or there is some sort of chemical in it to make it watertight

and of course, the plaster won't adhere to it.

It's difficult to know which walls have got this on and which haven't.

We had a really good look at that lower lounge before we started

because of the size of it,

and we came to the conclusion that it was sound enough to go ahead.

We've taken a chance on plastering it. Maybe we shouldn't have,

but, we've taken the chance and it's no' worked out, so...

All the plaster will have to be stripped off

and the work done again from scratch.

It could take weeks.

It's just a frustrating time, really, really frustrating.

Frustrating for me. I've put something on, spent time putting it on.

Now I've got to take it off and start the whole procedure again.

You know, but it's part of your job, you've just got to get on with it

and make sure that the next time we put it on, the surface is right, eh?

HE CHUCKLES

Two months later, I pay my second visit to Ralph and Evelyn.

I want to know if the restoration is still on track.

And one day...

One day this will be your lovely bedroom.

-Yes, it will be.

-That's the intent.

The master bedroom and en suite bathroom will be on the first floor corner,

above the sunken lounge.

But they're behind schedule up here, too.

You did at one point, I think, have an idea

-that you might be in for this Christmas.

-Yes, yes.

That's only a month away now, six weeks away,

-so that's out of the question now?

-Definitely.

-Well, we've done so much more.

The initial intent was to do the lower lounge,

the bar, as I call it, and the kitchen, and then just live up here.

But when we got up here and we started stripping the windows,

we realised there's a lot more to this.

They're still living in their temporary home

in the old hotel wing of the building,

where Evelyn seamlessly combines her own graphic design work

with managing the contractors on site.

That window is a brand-new window that Colin has made from scratch,

and he's now putting the new leaded panels in it, and it looks fantastic.

-That's exciting, isn't it?

-Great.

It's hard work, though, isn't it?

Yeah, it is hard going. It is hard work. And it's hard not being able to get away from it,

cos I don't really ever get away from it. I'm here all the time,

day in, day out, and it's because I work from home that I'm here

and that's what makes it possible, really.

-Colin!

-Ralph's job means he still has to spend time away

when he'd rather be here.

I mean, I'd love to just work on the house and not have to go to work

to earn the money, but of course every time you come home, you just

rush round and see what's being done through the day,

cos sometimes we have about five or six people,

-independent trades, working.

-Yeah.

It's eight weeks since the major setback with the plastering

in the sunken lounge.

In the end, drastic measures were needed to tackle the original wall covering,

which stopped the plaster sticking first time round.

Once the plaster come off again,

we had to then scrape off a layer of rubbery paint, wasn't it?

He actually had to use the hot gun you would usually use for paint work.

It was the only way we could get the paint to actually peel off.

After having to start his work all over again,

plasterer John has stuck patiently to the task.

And the end of his work on the troublesome sunken lounge

might finally be in sight.

Evelyn and Ralph's dream of recreating the original feel

of this hundred-year-old house was made even trickier,

because as the 20th century wore on,

the place became further and further removed

from its Arts and Crafts beginnings.

The original owner, Harben Valentine, sold in 1936,

and it was bought by Sir William Walker, a jute industrialist.

But then, during the Second World War,

this place became something very different from a family home.

The wartime base of the RAF's 333 Squadron

was just a few miles from Sandford House.

It operated search-and-destroy missions against enemy targets

-across the North Sea.

-NEWSREEL COMMENTATOR: A number of German merchant ships

and their escorts were known to be lying in Nordgulen Fjord, Norway,

and to attack them meant diving steeply between the snow-capped mountains of the enemy's hideout.

In 1942, new owners Sir William and Lady Walker

turned Sandford House into a leave centre for the RAF boys

down the road.

The airmen of 333 Squadron were Norwegians

who'd fled the Nazi occupation of their homeland.

These men were real heroes,

because Norway was invaded quite early on in the Second World War.

Some men broke away, came to Britain,

fought on behalf of the Allies and the Norwegian Resistance,

and it was some of these men who were looked after in Sandford House.

One of the heroes of 333 Squadron, who knew Sandford,

was Egil Johansen, now in his 90s.

Back home in his native Norway, Egil has never forgotten the role

Sandford played in his life.

Sandford was owned by the Walkers until the 1960s,

the last time the house was a family home.

It became a hotel in 1964.

The restoration is now well into its second year,

and Evelyn's thinking about Arts and Crafts decor.

Not all the original swan window handles have survived

since the house was built. And she wants to complete the set.

We need about ten of them.

They were obviously made for Sandford.

I've never ever seen anything like that anywhere else,

and nobody else has ever seen anything like that anywhere else.

So, you know, it would be really good to try and replace the ones

that have sort of gone missing over the years.

Thought to have been a family tradition of the first owner Harben Valentine,

it's likely the original swans were custom-made at least a century ago.

Evelyn has left one of the original handles with local blacksmith John Don

to see if he can replicate it.

-There's the original.

-Oh.

-And that's the one we've made.

-Oh, very good.

That's brilliant.

Obviously it's done different ways than what that was done originally.

You know, that would have been heated up.

-Right.

-Hammered out.

-Yes.

-And what we've done is individually cut that out...

-Yes.

..and then welded it onto there and just smoothed it off.

-And then we drilled the holes.

-Right.

And then just centre-punched these wee dimples,

just to give it that effect.

There's no way we would get it any better than that.

I think that's really, really good.

It's a 21st century re-crafting of an Edwardian window fitting.

But Evelyn suspects this long established local smithy

might have made Arts and Crafts window handles for Sandford once before.

The original ones were possibly made by your ancestors,

because you've been a blacksmith here,

-or the blacksmith's been here for years and years.

-Could have been, yeah.

And the house was built in 1902, so I think there's a fair chance

that the original ones were actually produced here.

Evelyn's next mission...

..furniture.

She hopes to find something just right for Sandford

at a specialist Arts and Crafts restorers.

Arts and Crafts furniture's quite plain and simple in style.

But everything is just so well made,

and its wee things like that, the details. These handles are just lovely.

Ralph and Evelyn's last house was modern, with fitted wardrobes.

Freestanding wardrobes are on the agenda for Sandford.

That one's £580.

So I mean, if you had to buy a new wardrobe that was as well-made

and as solid as that, it would cost you a lot more than that.

She think she might have spotted the Arts and Crafts wardrobe

of her dreams for the master bedroom.

I love that turquoisey blue colour, that's really nice.

That would suit the space perfectly.

Ralph and Evelyn have spent the last 18 months

trying to restore Sandford House to its original, perfect condition.

I've come to find out how they're getting on, but before I do,

Kate and Kieran are going to tell them everything

we've found out about this wonderful architectural gem.

So we wanted to go on the trail of him, and also to understand

-how exactly he came to work on your house in that spot.

-Yes.

This is the Red House, his own house that he designed for himself.

And we went here, really to try and understand some of the relationships in your house.

What you get to very quickly is this is the main lounge room,

-an inglenook fireplace lit by a window, this window in the side.

-Oh right, yes.

-Exactly, it's so similar, isn't it?

-Yeah.

KAREN: Quite a few houses were commandeered during the war.

The Norwegian 333 Squadron, they were living there

and very excitingly we've tracked one down. Oh, right.

-Egil Johansen here remembers the house and how much he enjoyed it there.

-Fantastic.

He's really excited you're restoring it, because it's got such happy memories for him.

I mean, the history is still so alive,

cos it's the history of the 20th century, isn't it? But there are so many strands to follow.

I think you should go to the Isle of Man and have a poke around

-some of those houses.

-And Norway.

-And Norway!

-Yes, absolutely.

-I think we'll be in touch with that gentleman.

-Hello, Evelyn, how are you?

-Fine. How are you?

-Really good. Lovely to see you.

-Nice to see you.

-Lovely to see you.

-Hello.

-Welcome back!

Thank you. And nice to see all the pipes gone.

-It's a lot better than it was.

-It is. What have you been doing now?

We've removed all the extra downpipes and also all the bits

where they had extractor fans stuck through the walls.

-You've taken all that away?

-All gone. It's definitely back to what it was when it was a house,

-rather than when it was a hotel.

-I'm really keen to have a look inside.

-Is it a good time?

-Oh, yeah.

-Let's go!

-Come on.

The remnants of its life as a hotel had taken its toll

on the interior of Sandford House as well.

In recent years, the essence of what made this meticulously-designed family home magical

had long been ripped apart and forgotten.

What was once the popular hotel bar

has been left in a terrible condition.

Turning this room back into the heart of a home would be a challenge.

Oh, it's just lovely.

What's immediately apparent now is how well its flows...

-Yes.

-..how you are drawn into this space here.

And you've got the full use of this,

-and then you can carry on up or down.

-Yes, that's right.

-This is how people want to live now.

-Yes, well, that's it.

Most modern houses, the living areas are all open-plan.

-He was really ahead of his time, wasn't he?

-I think so, yeah.

But of course, what's made it a real home is this, isn't it?

-It is.

-It's the wonderful fireplace.

And the Baillie Scott window,

tucked away to flood a little extra light, to throw another little...

-I know.

-..beam of light into the room.

It's the classic Baillie Scott theme, isn't it?

An inglenook fireplace with a window in the side.

Having reinstated Baillie Scott's signature window,

a further trace of the old hotel has been removed.

But it's the old restaurant that would be the biggest challenge.

Almost all evidence of the interior had been ripped out.

So in this room, it would be up to Ralph and Evelyn to fill the blanks.

Very, very nice.

The kitchen is flooded with light.

The leaded windows perfectly frame the spectacular landscape beyond.

-It's fantastically light...

-It is.

..and actually kind of effortlessly glamorous kitchen, isn't it?

What have we got here? Bread?

Oh, God, they're delightful. Oh, they're lovely!

-So really, you're bringing your own Arts and Crafts...

-Yes.

..into the modern parts of the house. It's these details that make the difference, isn't it?

Yes, yes, definitely.

Evidence of Ralph and Evelyn's attention to detail

now sits effortlessly alongside that of the original fabric of the house.

That's what I really love about this house,

is that you can tell that the architect and the guy paying the bills have spent hours...

-Yes, going over these sort of things.

-Talking about every last detail of it.

Architects of the Arts and Crafts period turned their hand

to much more than just fixtures and fittings.

Baillie Scott also designed furniture to sit within the houses he designed.

One such piece has been returned to Sandford House.

-There we go.

-Oh, it's a piano!

-It's a piano.

Well, there was one originally, downstairs in the lower lounge.

-In this house?

-Yeah.

-Back here where it belongs!

-Yeah.

It's our first bit of Baillie Scott furniture, but we'll get more.

And it was in the breathtaking sunken lounge

that they faced one of their biggest challenges.

Years of neglect had left the windows running with damp.

Water was penetrating the frames all over the house.

They have now been refurbished.

This is magnificent!

But you've done it exactly as it would have been done

-and you've replaced what would have been here.

-Yes.

-That was the intent all the way along.

-Yeah.

Do you love the house more than when you first saw it?

Oh, yeah, definitely.

I mean, I really did, when I first saw it,

you know, I really always loved the house as a building.

But I think actually living here now, it's sometimes hard to believe

that you're actually living in a house like this.

Having dried out and restored the fabric of the hall,

they're well on the way to completing this spectacular space.

They still have a long way to go in this restoration.

Their bedroom is ongoing,

but in the coming months they hope to have many more rooms completed.

Their dedicated and meticulous work

has cost them nearly £300,000 so far.

You're both perfectionists. Do you think you've achieved perfection?

-I would say so.

-Yes, we're satisfied with that. With the result.

Yes, it's definitely the way I wanted it to be.

There's no MDF, you know.

Coming to Sandford House,

you're immediately struck by the overwhelming care

that went into not just the design,

but also the construction of this house.

And I think at the heart of that is the relationship

between architect and client,

between Baillie Scott and Harben Valentine.

They were always going to be a very hard act to follow.

So after years of neglect, Sandford House now has a future,

not just because it's watertight and dry,

but because Evelyn and Ralph are applying the same care and obsession with detail

that was given to this place by those craftspeople

a hundred years ago.

And I know they are going to continue to do that

until everything here is perfect.

On the next Restoration Home,

a once-grand Georgian home sits rotting inside and out.

It is heartbreaking to see it in this state.

You just get a sense of how beautiful this space would have been.

Originally built for a rich landowning family,

today an ordinary family have sunk every penny they have

to make this their dream home.

I think it will look nice, and I think my dad will do a good job.

Deep down I want to be confident but I just... I don't know.

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