Caveat renovator: The TV star, the writer and the salvation of a crumbling farmhouse

'Has nobody in Grand Designs ever watched Grand Designs?' the actor and writer Robert Webb told The Times a few weeks ago. He wasn't reviewing the TV show, though, but instead musing on the often seemingly-inevitable catalogue of unexpected hurdles, costs, glitches and mini-disasters that are part and parcel of taking on a major project.

It's a lesson that Webb and his wife Abigail Burdess, together with Burdess's brother and his family, found out over a period of six years after buying a derelict Welsh farmhouse, Ty Llwyd, and transforming the 16th century dwelling beyond all recognition. The blood, sweat, tears and money that have been sunk in to the place have left them with a house that is immaculate and charming, set within 25 acres of rolling green countryside on the edge of the Brecon Beacons, a few miles north of Swansea. Rather sadly, it's also a house which no longer fits their needs, but Webb and Burdess's loss will the a new buyer's gain, so long as they have the £1.2 million asked by agents Savills.

Webb and Burdess had been looking for a rural home away from London where they could raise their families in a bucolic paradise, and right from the start Burdess

'Seeing Ty Llwyd for the first time, I understood what people mean when they describe places as magical,' she says of this unusual fortified farmhouse, which was covered by overgrown vegetation and in a terrible state.

'This will sound cheesy… but I got goosebumps,' she adds.

'I had a powerful sense of the age of the place... But it was a wreck, abandoned for some time — an enchanted castle — a Sleeping Beauty.'

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It market the start of a true passion project, with local architect Nick Brown working with the couple to find craftspeople and materials from the local area to turn it into the home as it stands now. Along the way they uncovered all manner of unexpected things, from old windows that had been long covered up to a pile of cannonballs in the stone spiral staircase. They even found a pair of shoes in an ancient bread oven.

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From the start, Webb and Burdess were adamant that they wanted this to be a project with deep roots in the local area. 'Almost all the materials have come from very close by,' says Burdess.

'The trusses are Welsh oak. The roof is reclaimed slates. Quite apart from the listing, it began to seem almost like we were dissing the house if we used anything but the best materials. We worked with all local trades — stonemasons, plumbers, joiners, electricians, carpenters; the amount of work in the plastering alone is pretty mind-boggling.'

As it stands now, the house is around 2,000 sq ft, with five bedrooms, a country kitchen, a 32ft-long living and dining room and a separate living room in one of the two wings, which were originally the cowshed and the stables.

There's also a space marked as the 'furnace room' on the floorplan, which only hints at the effort that's been made to create an eco-friendly home. The house runs off ground source heat, water comes from a bore hole with a state-of-the-art filtration system, and the house even has its own bio-rock sewage treatment plant. The wiring is set up to be ready for solar panels; while they can't be put on the house itself (which is Grade II-listed), they could easily be installed on the barn. The entire house, in other words, could be lived in entirely off grid.

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There are stables, paddocks and a large workshop within the 25 acres, as well as plentiful new trees: 'We are grateful to have been part of building something in the valley — and planting something: five thousand trees, so far, in the lower field and they’ve just shot up,' says Burdess. 'It’s mad how everything grows here.

'It’s a real, living house, and a beautiful one at that. The old magic’s still there — in that reality, and the community who’ve helped us build it. All it needs now is a real family to live in it.'

That brings us back to the lesson of Grand Designs referenced by Webb in the first place: not so much caveat emptor as caveat renovator. But despite costs spiralling against the background of the Pandemic and war in Ukraine, a labour of love is always rewarding, spiritually if not financially.

'We were really committed to all the best local materials and it was made with such care and love that what’s happened is we’ve ended up creating a house for which we are the wrong owners,' Webb concluded in his chat with The Times. Hopefully it'll be some consolation to one day pass the keys on to a family who are the right owners.

Ty Llwyd is for sale via Savills at £1.2 million — see more details.