Many of us long for a Georgian country pile, with sash windows, stone fireplaces and intricate cornicing. But the real appeal of a Georgian property, according to Khalil Hafiz Khairallah, who has spent nine years restoring one, is its proportions.

“Even though this is a huge house, with eight bedrooms, it still feels cosy. In older properties, sometimes even in Victorian ones, you have to stoop at every doorway, but the Georgian designers got ceiling heights and room sizes just right,” Khairallah says.

The property in question is Cairness House in Aberdeenshire, built in the 1790s, where Lord Castlereagh used to stay as a guest of the owners, the Gordons. Built in the Neo-Classical design, the house has just won the best restored country house category at the 2009 Georgian Group Architectural Awards.

Khairallah and his friend Julio Soriano-Ruiz bought the property, in which they now live, in 2000 and have since spent more than £1 million restoring it. “It was a private residence and hadn’t really had anything done to it since 1922. It had huge structural problems and was damp and mouldy,” Khairallah says.

With no real experience of property restoration, Khairallah, a journalist of Lebanese descent, and Soriano-Ruiz, an art historian from Madrid, set about putting together a team with the right skills to restore Cairness to its former glory. They have retiled the roof, installed central heating, restored 180 windows and spent a year and a half removing and recasting 51 cast-iron chimney pots.

Tim Whittaker, the director of the Spitalfields Historic Building Trust, has had rather more experience in Georgian restoration projects: over the past 30 years his trust has restored more than 70 derelict buildings in the trendy Spitalfields area of East London, home to an “arty” crowd, including the artists Gilbert and George.

Whittaker’s latest completion, ten three-bedroom properties with gardens on Turner Street and Var-den Street, near Whitechapel, were snapped up by buyers before the restoration began four years ago, for about £200,000 each, with an additional £300,000 for the building works.

Restoring Georgian properties can be expensive, Whittaker says: “The Georgians were pre-industrial so they used natural materials — natural timber, hand-made bricks and roof tiles — so we try to use them, too. Obviously, if we have to put in a bit of steel to stop the building collapsing, we will.”

For the a complete list of winners in the Georgian Group Competition, go to timesonline.co.uk/property

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