Me And My Home: In a class of his own

Mary Wilson talks to James Wynn about his epic conversion of a former school near Bath

James Wynn is best known for his performance as Sooty Sutcliffe in the early-Eighties television series "Grange Hill". He now runs a video production company and renovates property

My wife Anna and I had been living in London for years, but once we had two young children - Abigail, who is 9, and Julia, 7 - neither of us wanted to bring them up in London. So we ended up in Bath, after we fell in love with a house there, which needed a lot of work. I really loved doing it up and thought I would like to do it again. I had turned 50 and wanted a challenge that was also fun to do. I wanted something that would use my abilities, but in a different way.

"Somehow, doing up a place from scratch is quite similar to making videos. You start with a blank canvas, the visual side is the same - you have to see in 3D, visualise shapes and spaces before they exist - and the satisfaction is the same. So we found Combe House in Castle Combe, about 10 miles away.

"The house is in a dreamy, quintessentially English country village and it has ended up even more dreamy than I thought it would. It was originally a 17th-century agricultural building, then in the 1820s it was turned into a school. When we saw it, it had 16 outside loos, a massive oil tank and lots of tarmac. It had been for sale for some time, and I think no-one had liked the scale of what had to be done. The inside was quite simple to convert, but the outside was horrendous.

"The playground was at the height of where the bedrooms are now and there was a 6ft-deep trench all around the property. We had to take out 400 tonnes of rock to expose the elevations and that really was the key. Then we were able to build terracing and create a lovely private garden behind the old stone wall. We used the rock to make the terrace, which wraps around the house in a sort of Provençal style. This was a massive operation and took six months to do. All the steps are lit at ground level, which looks wonderful at night, and I put in several water features too.

"The good thing about the house being a former school is that it is very solid and the council had looked after it well. Five years before we bought the house the council had put on a new stone tiled roof, so we didn't have to touch that. Inside there were two big halls, about 70 feet long by 15 feet wide, one upstairs and one downstairs, and all that space really attracted me. The building also had very large windows and this was one of the joys of the place, as it was so light.

"When I was thinking about how to convert the halls, I remembered seeing something I had always wanted to do while walking along the river in Chiswick, west London. We had noticed that one of the houses had a fireplace in the middle of a very big room and you could see right through that into the kitchen. I thought I would do something similar here. So the feature of the ground floor at Combe House is the half partition across a huge room, in the middle of which is a double-sided, wood-burning stove. You can put logs into it from either side and, like the Chiswick house, see right through from the sofa in the family room on one side into the dining area and kitchen. There are shelves each side for the hi-fi and television. I think it is charming.

"In the sitting room, I built out the chimney breast so that I could put in two alcoves on either side. And the shelves in all the living rooms have a gap at the back, where I have put in hidden lighting, so that when you look at them at night, the effect is of the shelves floating on light.

"I also created a wide, arched recess over the kitchen units, with a door either side. Across this is a huge plate rack with lighting top and bottom, which gives the rack a floating effect too. As I am quite into lighting, I have put in a computerised Lutron system. Although it is a 'toy', it is also quite practical as it makes it so easy to turn off all the lights - just with one switch. In the house in Bath, friends could never find out how to turn all the lights off. I also put in a hi-fi system, which is piped into all the rooms with hidden speakers.

"It's like city living in the country, the kind of thing you see in London all the time, but not that common here. But I have tried to use what was there and show it off at its best, rather than lobbing huge platefuls of design. I just wanted to show off the features to their best advantage. One thing I did, which the builders couldn't understand, was to take out the original floorboards. Although they were perfectly good, they were running across the width of the room, rather than the length. I wanted them running lengthways, which looked visually more pleasing. All through the house, where possible, I made decisions based on visual aesthetics.

"One of the magical things about the house is that every room has two aspects. Some even have three and each view is different - one's a wood, one is fields, the other is the terracing. Most of the windows have the original stone work and the new ones have been made to match the old. But as much as we love the house we have decided to stay in Bath, so we are selling this one rather than the other."

Combe House, which has four bedrooms, three bathrooms, summer house and four acres, including a paddock, is on the market through John D Wood (01865 642244) for £975,000.