A decommissioned industrial space is transformed into a one-of-a-kind home
WORDS JAYNE DOWLE PHOTOGRAPHY MARK BOLTON
Three years ago, all that was visible of what would become Rosa and Craig’s home in the Wye Valley, Herefordshire, was the battered, curved roof of a disused steam railway’s reservoir. And it almost stayed that way, because despite substantial funds – the couple had £100,000 from the sale of their previous home, plus Rosa’s £350,000 inheritance from her grandfather, and a mortgage that ultimately totalled £680,000 – they ran out of money after around 18 months thanks to a mix-up over VAT. ‘We’d been incorrectly thinking that our build was zero-rated when in fact we had to pay 5 per cent,’ Craig explains.
As a result, Craig, 34, who is a skydive instructor and Rosa, 31, an audiologist, were landed with an unexpected bill for almost £40,000. ‘The VAT charge meant we lost our cash-flow, which had been really healthy,’ says Craig. ‘Work had to stop until we could convince our mortgage provider to lend us the money to carry on.’
The couple had a stage payment mortgage, so each phase of work was checked and valued by the lender’s surveyor before more funds were released. ‘Rosa and I were in constant pursuit of money, but we weren’t going to give up on the dream of building our home,’ says Craig.
The empty reservoir, once fed from a local spring, was built in the early 20th century to supply water to steam locomotives on the Great Western Railway, but was decommissioned in the mid 20th century. ‘The 28-acre plot has been owned by my family for more than 10 years, and before that it belonged to a close family friend,’ explains Rosa. ‘I spent a lot of my childhood playing on the land and the reservoir building was always there – mainly used for storing farm equipment.’
Rosa and Craig, who have a two-year-old son, Leo, own five acres of the land, with the rest belonging to Rosa’s mother Tessa. Growing up, Rosa imagined living on the land without any idea of how she might make the dream a reality. But two years after they met, she and Craig decided to investigate the possibility of converting the building.
They sold their five-bedroom Victorian house in Hereford and moved in with Tessa and Rosa’s grandfather, also called Leo, a retired builder who sadly passed away just before work began on the project. ‘We didn’t have planning permission,
