Helen McGrath-Doherty still calls moving to Norfolk an “adventure”.
She and her husband, Pete, made the move around seven years ago, along with their two children, who were then 10 and 14.
She says it was partly so that they could be closer to family, but also to fulfil Helen’s dream of setting up her own glamping retreat – although it didn’t quite go to plan.
“We sold our house in London and thought it would be very easy to find something near Norwich, with land, that we could afford and sort of do what we wanted to do,” says Helen. “Clearly that wasn’t going to be the case.”
The family rented a place for the best part of a year, Helen says. They had almost given up on the idea of finding their dream home, and were settling on the idea of living in Norwich. Then an estate agent contacted them. “He’d just taken a property on that had really beautiful land. I sort of bit his hand off,” says Helen.
“It was a barn with planning permission but it had 14 acres of land with it – a bit of woodland and some paddocks and a wildflower meadow and a huge pond and stables. We were just completely blown away by it.”
Helen admits that, when buying the property, the family were slightly “blinkered” to the work that needed to be done. Suddenly they had 14 acres of land, an 18th century barn to convert and a caravan to live in while work began.
“It didn’t seem quite as frightening as it might to some people,” Helen admits, although she’s not sure if she’d recommend it. “My husband’s in the building trade, my father was a builder, so I’m very used to having lived all my life in houses that are being pulled apart and extensions being built and finished.
“I pretty much followed the path that my parents took, which was renovating old houses and selling them on, and that’s exactly what I’ve done with each property I’ve bought. But it’s never been anything to the extent of a barn conversion – I don’t know that I’d recommend it to anyone or even that I’d do it again!”
The actual build didn’t go as smoothly as they had hoped, either. “Everything that you see go wrong on Grand Designs did,” she says.
“You couldn’t make it up. We had a part of the barn that, as we were digging out to put the sub floors in, we discovered that it was just being held up by about eight upright beams that, over the course of 200 years, the bottoms of them had just worn away. The building was just swinging in the breeze with no foundation.”
This meant putting a whole new foundation block in, causing their contingency money to disappear in the first six weeks. “It wasn’t the most sensible idea from a financial point of view.”
The move, as well as the building project, took “bravery” and “guts”, Helen says, and it can often go wrong. “My parents left London when I was a kid and bought a plot of land to build a house in Norfolk,” she explains. “It completely went over budget and, you know, as all these things do, they ended up having to sell the house and not being able to live in it.”
But Helen and Pete did things differently. The family spent around £150,000-£180,000 converting the barn, doing a lot of the work themselves. This made the process much slower, and, compared to their house in London, they have a much bigger mortgage.
But it’s all been worth it. “It has been an amazing experience,” Helen says. “And I actually think that both of our kids would say that as well. It’s been a real adventure.
"I’m really glad that we were brave enough to make that jump and sort of show our kids that anything is possible, in a way – you don’t have to sit with that safe life that you’ve got, you can throw it all up in the air and see where it lands and where it takes you and what’s going to happen next.”
After completing the barn, Helen and Pete turned their attention to the second part of the dream, creating Helen’s glamping business. She says the process was really “stop-start”, partly because Pete was made redundant during the project, which impacted funds, and partly because Covid forced everyone into lockdown. Helen raised “quite a lot” of the money – around £10,000 – through a crowdfunding campaign, which a Natwest initiative matched to help them finish the build.
The result is Albion Nights, a rustic, off-grid cabin, created out of reclaimed items and building materials salvaged from the barn. The name was inspired by her parents’ love of the Albion Fairs, a selection of “really beautiful festivals” held throughout East Anglia in the 1980s, and the barn itself created out of what the family could salvage from their own barn conversion.
“We were having a sort of ever-increasing pile of building materials that were coming out of the barn that weren’t being used again,” Helen explains.
“I was looking at this pile of things and basically said to my husband ‘we need to build a tiny house for my business and we’ve got all this stuff here’, so it was very much a bit of a jigsaw puzzle, of looking at what we had and how we could make that [into something]. The whole build was about reusing, upcycling, recycling – the whole shebang.
“It was very much an idea in my head, which then got drawn on to a scrap of paper and then 3D visualised and put in for planning, and it was quite slow because of that. But it does mean that we’ve ended up with something completely unique, which pretty much predominantly has been made by and built from things that we had or have picked up off Freecycle or Facebook Marketplace.”
As a result, the cabin is “quite special”, Helen says. It’s not off the peg or constructed from a kit but curated, by hand, to tell a story about the land around it.
“Everything in the cabin has a story in some way. Obviously we were doing a barn renovation, so we had hundreds of things being delivered on pallets. My husband painstakingly took them all apart, de-nailed and sanded them and used that as cladding.
“We’ve got this outdoor bath and it’s housed in the original water butt from the barn when it was a farm building. The roof of the cabin was the roof of some pig-sties that were at the front of the barn. It’s just lovely to have a real story attached to it and actually, it makes the cabin very much part of the barn’s story as well.”
Helen welcomed her first paying guests to Albion Nights, which occupies its own six-acre meadow, around 18 months ago. So far, she says the feedback has been “absolutely amazing”, with around 40pc of her guests coming from the local area.
“Having a stay in the cabin is all about your wellbeing, because it is about you. You’re not going to be sitting on Zoom and you’re not going to be streaming things on Netflix.
“You’re coming in, hopefully you’re bringing your knitting and a good book and some nice, nourishing food with you, and sitting around a fire and sleeping better and connecting with yourself in a very different way that we don’t often give ourselves the time to do.”
Helen is the first to admit that converting the barn into their new home, and then creating Albion Nights, hasn’t always been a “smooth ride”, that it’s involved hard graft and courage to achieve. But for her, it is exactly that – an achievement – and she’s happy with the result. “I feel really blessed and lucky every day. Sometimes I can’t quite believe I’m doing that – that thing I was talking about doing, I’ve actually made it happen.
“It feels like a massive achievement and I’m really proud of myself. It’s been a real sort of reinvention of my life, really, and I’m living it – I’m almost living the dream, I think.”
For more information, visit www.albionnights.co.uk
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