Every time Curtis Jobling, the designer behind Bob the Builder, looks at the hit children’s television show, it’s a reminder of his home in a tiny hamlet tucked away in the North Yorkshire countryside.

The patchwork fields in Bob’s background are the Hambleton Hills, the beautiful, rolling scenery north of York that surrounds his house in the village of Carlton Husthwaite.

“I first fell in love with this part of the world when I was a teenager,” says Jobling, now 34. “I was doing the coast-to-coast walk from the Irish Sea to the North Sea, and there’s a point near here where you can stand on the edge of the North York Moors and look back across the Vale of York to the Dales. It’s just breathtaking. There’s the hills in the distance, and a pattern of fields laid out beneath them. I have been to a few of the most beautiful places in the world, and this is as good as any of them.

“When I came to draw the backgrounds for Bob, they came straight into my mind.”

The worldwide success of the moon-faced man in a yellow hard hat means Jobling is moving on, heading back to his native Cheshire. He wants to be closer to his latest venture, an animated version of his children’s book Frankenstein’s Cat, being made for the BBC in Manchester, and featuring the singular voice of I’m a Celebrity winner Joe Pasquale.

All he has to do now is sell the home he and his wife, Emma, set up four years ago in Carlton Husthwaite’s former church reading rooms.

“We shall be sad to go — we have made friends and, I hope, become part of the community,” says Jobling. “The name of the house sold it to us even before we came to see it: ‘the Reading Rooms’ was just brilliant for a children’s storybook writer and illustrator, and it was love at first sight.

“We were looking for somewhere midway between Emma’s family in Middlesbrough and mine in the northwest, and this is very handy — although we are off the beaten track, it is very close to motorways and the big cities.”

Built in 1902 of the dark red brick used in many of the other houses in the village, the building was a project to improve the minds of parishioners at St Mary’s church next door.

“I have met villagers who can remember childhood moments in here sitting on their grandparents’ knees beside a roaring coal fire as they read the newspapers,” says Jobling. “Although it was converted to a private house 20 years ago, there is still a proprietorial feel about it in the village — people were very keen to see who had moved in when we came.”

The house’s ecclesiastical connections show in its lancet windows — most feature a Tudor rose, the white of Yorkshire with the red of Lancashire at its centre. “Emma and I took that as a sign, symbolising our union from either side of the Pennines.”

The three-bedroom house features a huge living room, rising high into the sloping roof. Original pitch-pine panelling at one side masks the way to the side door and the tiny garden, which incorporates the village phone box — still in use — tastefully screened by a lush climber. The fire, which once toasted the toes of Husthwaite’s senior citizens, has been replaced with an impressive French cast-iron stove that warms the entire house.

Off the main room is a galley-style kitchen and dining area, with the bathroom beyond. That is the only area where Jobling tried to be his own Bob the Builder. “I am not a handyman,” he confesses. “My dad did most of the work installing that; we have just stuck to decorating.”

Also on the ground floor is the main bedroom, which looks out over the village green and a giant chestnut tree, and the room used during regular visits by his five-year-old son Andrew, from his first marriage, who lives in Cheshire with his mum.

Upstairs, on a mezzanine floor fitted into the steeply pitched roof, is the third bedroom, occupied by Evie, Jobling and Emma’s 13-month- old daughter. Also here is an open gallery where many of Bob’s fellow characters and Jobling’s later creations were first sketched out on his easel.

Drawings made here are sent off to animators and puppeteers in Manchester for conversion into the images we see on television. He also creates pictures for a gallery in New York, where his work is becoming increasingly collectable.

Jobling studied illustration in Middlesbrough, then did work experience with Wallace & Gromit’s creators at Aardman, and then in 1996 landed a plum job making models on director Tim Burton’s sci-fi film Mars Attacks! “That proved to be a false dawn,” he laughed. “I went from that to 12 months of unemployment — Jobling to Job-less. I was quite literally on my last few pennies when someone I had once sold a drawing to asked for some illustrations about a character in the building trade who fixed things for people. They liked what I offered.

“I finally realised it had arrived when I heard some children singing the theme song. I was so stunned, I fell into a bush.”

The Reading Rooms is for sale for £275,000 with Hunters, 01347 823 535, www.huntersnet.co.uk

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