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By Root 404 0

of the Surrey Hills and had stunning views. All this was, I had to admit, a good start. The barn itself was in good shape for its age and the developers were in the process of putting three storeys into the massive space – and that was as far as they had got. As I watched them, it suddenly occurred to me that I might be able to design the place myself. Would this be possible? I asked. The foreman shrugged. He didn’t care. ‘If you buy it,’ he said, ‘you can have it any way you like, as long as you pay for any changes to what we’ve done already.’ Well, what they had done already didn’t amount to much, so I began to get excited: it would be great fun to design a house again, I thought.

I decided to walk around the grounds, which were set on a beautiful sloping hillside. The place had been a barn and busy riding school, attached to the big manor house further up the hill, and so had no garden or cultivation of any kind – it was just virgin fields with a road for delivery trucks. It would be fantastic to design a garden again, I thought, and as I walked round the whole twenty-one acres, I felt excitement welling up inside me at the prospect. Just as I was circling round and back to the building site I saw something that made me certain that this place was right for me and for my family. (Actors are very superstitious people indeed – me included: it’s a dodgy profession and you need all the help you can get.) As I stood there, looking out at the view, a flock of about thirty beautiful yellow and green parrots flew over my head. What on earth were they doing in Surrey? When I asked the foreman he told me that they were Brazilian parrots that had escaped from a film set in Shepperton Studios, which wasn’t far away. ‘Which film?’ I asked, curious. ‘The African Queen,’ was the answer – and that was almost all I needed to know. Humphrey Bogart and John Huston? It was a sign . . . But the ultimate test for me is the ‘sitting-down test’. Just as I had done years before when I was looking at Mill House and invited Mum and Paul to come along, I brought Shakira and Natasha the next day. They loved the setting straight away, but there was one flaw in my experiment: it was a building site and so of course there was nowhere for them to sit down. I needn’t have worried. When I asked them where they would like to go for lunch, they both said they would like to go into town and buy some sandwiches and bring them back to the barn and have a picnic on the grass. I had my answer and I bought the place.

There are a couple of lessons I have learnt in life that applied to buying this house. Sometimes the greatest things that happen to you are out of your control, but they are destined for you anyway. It happened most significantly with Shakira, of course: I only met her because I stayed in one night and watched television. To this day I have no idea what made me do it – it was something I had never done before in my life and have hardly done since – but not a day goes by when I don’t thank my lucky stars for it. It was the same with our new house. I had the house of my dreams in my hand and threw it into the wastepaper basket not once, but twice . . . but something made me rescue the scrunched-up ad, smooth it out and – well, I’m sitting here now!

The house is in the Green Belt, a designated conservation area in which no one is allowed to build. The developer had only got planning permission to do the conversion if he agreed to tear down 46,000 square feet of other buildings on the estate. That had already happened by the time I came along, but I saw the photographs and the old riding school, stables and horses’ swimming pool were some of the ugliest buildings I have ever seen. There was also a drive straight up from the main road to the barn. When I bought it as a house, I was told that I couldn’t have a gate on the main road and that we would have to go round the back of the property. I was really upset at the time, because I did want to have this great drive up to the front of my house, but in fact it turned out to be the best thing that could