My Place: Andrew and Jacqui

In 1985, Andrew and Jacqui Olver and their neighbours Keith and Katy Hallett were outgrowing their respective homes in Montpelier and thinking about moving to the country with their young children. “Katy and I used to meet up at softplay and compare notes,” Jacqui recalls. “A home in the country was beyond our means but we realised that if we looked for a bigger place, we might be able to split it.”

It was an unconventional idea, but one that has worked for the past 33 years. Both families clubbed together to buy and renovate a grand home on the edge of Nailsea, creating two spacious dwellings that have accommodated children and now grandchildren in understated country splendour.

The home is mentioned in the Doomsday Book and was bought in the 1600s by Edward Tynte, the second son of the wealthy family who built Tyntesfield just a stone’s throw away. His coat of arms, a lion and six crosses, are carved above the main porch that now leads out to Andrew and Jacqui’s pristine garden, and above the stone fireplace in their panelled dining room.

Edward Tynte’s coat of arms above the porch

After staying in the family for two generations, Tynte’s grandson left the house under a tenancy agreement in 1660. Incredibly, this lasted 300 years: “The last tenant farmer was still alive when we moved to the village,” Jacqui says. The farmers who bought it in the 1960s retreated into fewer and fewer rooms as the roof began to leak. It was semi-derelict when the two families bought it but was largely left unchanged by the “meddlesome” Victorians and Edwardians. “There was a tin-bath symphony when it rained,” Jacqui recalls. “Like other old houses, it had been left to gently decay.”

The house was in a state of near-ruin when bought by the two families

Renovations took three years, with a design drawn up by Keith, an architect. He also built a house on the site of the Great Hall: only one wall remained and the sale gave them the capital they needed to make the main house inhabitable. As a Grade II*-listed building, restorations had to be sympathetic – something that wasn’t a problem. “Both of our families share a love of building and we follow the principles of William Morris: gentle repair, not over-restoration,” Jacqui says.

The blue bedroom with its impressive four-poster bed

At the very top of Andrew and Jacqui’s part of the house is a sunny yellow bedroom with exposed roof beams. “We think the timbers are originally from ships because they have strange marks on them,” Jacqui says. Down the original spiral staircase is a landing with four more bedrooms, including a grand blue room with a four-poster bed. A new passageway, created to give access to Andrew and Jacqui’s soft pink bedroom, involved cutting through the four-and-a-half-foot thick walls; a shower room with a lead floor from an old water system fits neatly into a hollowed-out part of the wall.

The most dramatic original feature is a huge Jacobean staircase, the wood black from age, that takes up around a fifth of the entire floorspace. An enormous plaster boss hangs from the ceiling, the design of which is echoed in the knot garden outside. “There’s a story people tell in the pub that someone once drove a horse and cart up the stairs,” Jacqui says. The bottom stair has horseshoes and a round oxen shoe embedded into the wood to guard against witches entering the house.

The huge Jacobean staircase is mentioned by Pevsner

The staircase leads down to the galley kitchen with its impressive 17th century grained wood panelling, one of just two examples in the country, which also continues into the dining room. “It’s terrifically lively; it could be on the walls of the Tate Modern,” Jacqui says. Beyond is the large living room with blue limewashed walls – a restoration technique that she and Katy had to perfect themselves. “You can’t use modern paint. We had to get the pigment from an agricultural supplier – they are dyes for sheep.”

A beautiful shade of blue in one of the large spare bedrooms

With the kitchen door open to the garden and the churchyard beyond, and Katy working in her part of the garden on the other side of the house, this house feels completely timeless, save for the occasional car on the lane and the rattle of passing trains. Both couples have worked tirelessly to bring the home back from the brink of ruin, and their histories are now entwined with the legacy of the place. “There are stories of ghosts in this house, but we’ve never found any,” Jacqui says. “The only spirits here are benign.”

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