It takes a rare spirit to jump into the unknown, but for Hetan and Silvie, a move to Kington and the transformation of Castle Hill House into a unique boutique B&B has been the latest in a series of adventures that began when they met while backpacking in Australia.

“We met somewhere in the outback,” says Silvia, who had travelled to Australia from Berlin, while Hetan was from Kent.

But at the end of their travels in Australia, Silvie admits that "I still had the travel bug. And I didn’t really want to go back to Germany so I moved in with Hetan back in the UK. "

At that point, the idea of opening a B&B in a place they’d never heard of and had never visited was not remotely on the agenda, but “we were already doing up some properties around the London area and did that for a few years.”

“My parents did their house up, too, and I was working as one of the builders, painters and decorators,” adds Hetan, “and I did a bit of painting and decorating when we were in Australia.

“The interest was always there,” he says. “and I decided that it was the direction I wanted to take, but I soon realised that I needed help with what I put inside the houses, and so Silvie and I partnered up for four years.”

That experience has proved invaluable as they have transformed a house whose bones were not immediately visible when they first visited, and it is clearly a partnership in which their skills are a great combination, complementary skills that have enabling them to create a quartet of rooms (and a self-catering cottage), each of which has a very distinct personality.

Even in their backpacking days, it becomes clear that the germ of the hospitality idea had been sown, as Silvia explains.

“We stayed in this very sociable hostel – I went back three times as it was somewhere I could also work and earn money – and we did say ‘maybe one day, we should have a hostel’.

In fact, it was when they were looking for a new house that Silvia came across a B&B in Whitstable and said ‘oh, look, there’s a B&B on the market’.

“That’s when the whole idea started and then we began looking for already-established businesses.”

Ultimately they decided against taking that route, having discovered that they would pay more for a business that was already up and running, and, as Hetan says, once they found a suitable property that was not yet a guest house it was possible to put in a pre-planning application which would tell them whether their ambitions could be realised.

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One thing that was clearly in their favour was having no set idea of where they wanted to be.

“Our search criteria was a seven-bed house in the UK and we looked for over a year.

The most important thing was that our living space shouldn’t be too small, and we also had to ask ourselves how far we would move from London.”

The search area crept ever further out until on one occasion they found themselves flying to Scotland to view a property.

“So we were delighted when we saw this house,” says Hetan. “It ticked all the boxes.”

Both Hetan and Silvia agree that the vision they had for the house once they’d seen it enabled them to overlook many of the things that seemed to have put other people off, among them the enormous quantity of books (the last owner had been a bookseller!) in ever corner, effectively disguising the space.

They are also in complete agreement about the thing that convinced them both, in the same moment, that Castle Hill House would give them the change of lifestyle they were searching for.

“We stepped into the conservatory and saw the view,” says Silvia. “We just looked at each other and smiled.”

Glamour and comfort

The decision made and the house secured, they moved in in February 2016 and opened in February 2017, very quickly establishing themselves and going on to win Visit Herefordshire’s award for best accommodation in 2018.

Having established what they wanted to do in the house, including ripping up all the carpets and underlay to reveal stunning age-burnished floorboards, and resisting the temptation to make an additional bedroom, instead creating a large en suite room, named Offa’s Dyke, that is a real experience room, full of glamour, comfort and interest.

All four guest rooms are distinctly different – a twin room is full of understated fin de siècle glamour, while a second superking room is restful and elegant in shades of grey, with a chandelier adding an elegant touch.

“We had a good idea that it was going to be eclectic, a mix of the old and new,” says Silvia.

“And it’s been fun doing that. The great thing about this house is that it’s old so nothing had to be perfect.”

Throughout the house there are examples of some neat and very creative solutions – like two bedside tables that are the two halves of a table Hetan asked the carpenter to cut in half. “He used to laugh at what we wanted to do.”

The same two-for-one approach resulted in a console table in the hall, while the other half of the table became one of Hetan’s clever transformations of antique pieces into vanity units in the bathrooms, with beautiful bowls repurposed as basins.

In the twin bedroom, Hetan points to the overmantel and fireplace, originally two separate pieces, which were his first foray into the shabby chic look.

And there are touches of this everywhere – in the adjoining, self-catering cottage, a standard pine bed looks anything but having been treated with chalk paint and wax for a very different look.

Colour has been used throughout the house to create the distinctive looks of each room, with accessories carefully selected from a variety of sources, including the striking towel hooks in Offa’s Dyke’s bathroom, which came from a flea market in Berlin, one of Silvie’s favourite hunting grounds.

Castle Hill House is one of those houses which offers inspiration to anyone visiting – a great lesson in how a little bit of lateral thinking will enable you to replicate elements of their striking interior in your own home.

It’s the couple’s instinctive understanding of what will suit the house and their creative approach to realising their vision that impresses.

There’s undoubtedly an art to transforming a house into somewhere with a vivid personality, somewhere that offers a real escape, partly thanks to how unique the interior is, but where comfort and luxury have not been compromised.

And Silvie and Hetan have done exactly that at Castle Hill House.

“There is nowhere here doing this kind of accommodation,” says Hetan. “But there have been moments when we questioned what we were doing – it is a risk.”.

Castle Hill House Kington

Castlehillhousekington.co.uk

01544 209066