People often claim fate as the agent of a house move. ‘It was meant to be,’ they say, and sometimes it is hard to disagree. Twelve years ago, the owners of this West Country rectory were starting to think of moving from Bristol to somewhere more rural, when they spotted its particulars online: they decided to attend the open day, even though the location would mean a long commute for them both – she was working for the BBC, he was a criminal barrister.

‘We turned up in our old jalopy to find ranks of shiny four-by-fours and a queue of people waiting for tours of the house in 10-minute slots,’ she says. ‘We thought we didn’t have a chance, especially as our townhouse wasn’t even on the market. But when we stepped through the front door, all our doubts about the location dropped away. It was beautiful and felt like coming home.’

The hall runs down the centre of the house and still has its original floor of huge Blue Lias flags. The walls are painted in Farrow & Ball’s ‘Entrance Hall Pink’. On a chest at the far end is a bust allegedly based on the real Scarlet Pimpernel. The Christmas tree is decorated with glass baubles bought as seconds from Bristol Blue Glass 20 years ago.

Michael Sinclair

From that moment, despite the competition, everything ‘magically fell into place’. The then owner of the rectory wanted it to go to a family with young children. Meanwhile, someone knocked on the door of their house in Bristol to say they would like to buy it. ‘We had two young children and a six-week-old baby,’ says the owner. ‘But when our offer on the rectory was accepted, we didn’t think twice. We moved into a rented cottage in the village and applied for planning permission.’

Built in the early 1840s for a rector with nine daughters, the house is classical and symmetrical from the outside, its front door opening onto the path that leads to the adjacent church. Inside, its grandest feature is a broad central hall, punctuated by three arched openings, which stretches from the front door, past the sweeping staircase to a window at the back. In the original layout, the three rooms leading off it to the right were reception rooms and the rooms to the left were the rector’s office at the front, and beyond it a series of smaller service rooms – the kitchen, scullery, larder and pantry. The rectory had been divided into two when it was sold off by the church in the Fifties, so the current owners have created a new layout to reunite it as one house.