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The couple who bought a crumbling Scottish villa – by accident – and turned it into a holiday let
12.10.2023 - 21:37 / theguardian.com
You know that feeling when you accidentally buy the wrong house? No, me neither. Cal Hunter does, though, and it was to prove quite the most fortuitous error of the 31-year-old carpenter’s life.
The blunder, in 2018 – attributed to a fast-talking auctioneer and a mix-up with lot numbers – left him and his partner Claire Segeren, 29, with a derelict Victorian villa 35 miles from the apartment in Glasgow that they had been targeting.
They had wanted a project; they got a property described as “on the point of collapse”, a state presumably shared by their families when they saw the couple’s purchase.
Not to be disheartened, and because Scottish auction bids are legally binding, the pair embarked on a restoration so daunting and improbable it lasted four-and-a-half years, garnered global media attention, spawned a warts-and-all documentary, and saw them accrue more than 300,000 Instagram followers.
Sitting in the open-plan living room/kitchen of one of the two holiday lets they fashioned from the ground floor of the villa, named Jameswood, the couple give off a faint air of incredulity. The paint’s barely dry. We’re their first visitors. I don’t think they can quite believe what they’ve achieved.
My young children are equally dumbstruck; it’s a rare holiday indeed on which you watch your hosts in a four-part BBC series on the journey there, then find them waiting for you on the doorstep. “Look – it’s the sweary one!” announced my youngest, yet to be initiated into the boundless frustrations of DIY.
The sweary one, for his part, is looking relaxed after a morning shifting soil in the garden, which extends 24 metres to the rear and will soon boast a pizza oven around which guests and their hosts can mingle. “Despite everything, I knew quite quickly that this was the house for us,” he says.
Our two-bedroom flat is served by what was formerly the main entrance; it has a boot room, a bay window with views down to the water and french windows leading to the garden. The neighbouring flat, of similar scale, is accessed via a side door, and the home Cal and Claire have created upstairs for themselves has its own steps and entrance at the back.
All three are spacious and high-ceilinged, and mix Victorian solidity with contemporary decor. The fire-engine red of our living room door has us pestering Claire for the paint manufacturer. And where once the legs of a chair in the room above descended from the ceiling, now hangs a retractable projector screen for watching films. The flats are immaculate but also (parents give thanks) hardy. “Dogs, mud, sand, it’s all good!” says Claire.
The really fortuitous part of the botched house purchase was the setting: the 120-year-old red-sandstone property is on the edge of
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