It’s easy to see why blue-blooded neighbours might object to Lord and Lady
Teksnes of Old Colehurst Manor. When you are posh and proud of it, you don’t
want upstarts swanning into your county, renovating a luscious Elizabethan
manor house and setting themselves up as grand hosts.
Bjorn and Maria Teksnes, however, are more than a match for the grandees of
Shropshire. He is a Norwegian civil engineer turned golf pro turned restorer
of houses; she is a Londoner of Greek parentage who thinks nothing of
providing Elizabethan-style banquets for dozens at a time, complete with
minstrels.
It is their title, bought rather than inherited, that distressed one
neigh-bour: Richard, 7th Earl of Bradford, no less. The earl hates the
practice of selling "titles" so much, he runs a web-site, www.faketitles.com,
devoted to the issue. The Teksneses rate a mention in a section called “Some
of the dodgier titles that we have come across”.
Teksnes is cagey about the title’s authenticity and provenance, maintaining
that it came with the house. Yet, with his mass of white curls and
infectious enthusiasm, the 62-year-old is eccentric and engaging, in true
aristo fashion. When he dresses in Elizabethan regalia, it’s tempting to
curtsy, for he plays the part to perfection.
He has had plenty of practice. For six years, he and Maria, 49, took paying
guests for country-house weekends at their home, Old Colehurst Manor, just
outside Market Drayton and 18 miles from Shrewsbury. Their customers – from
America, Japan and the Middle East, as well as Britain – were attracted by
the personality of their hosts as well as the charm of the setting.
It’s quite a setting, too. The timber-framed house, built in 1580 in the
Elizabethan E shape, is Grade II*-listed. Its huge oak front door opens onto
a panelled great hall with a roaring fire, flagstones and a priest hole. To
the right are the drawing room and dining room, all polished oak, leaded
windows and impressive carved fireplaces; to the left is the banqueting
hall, with a great cauldron hanging in the inglenook.
A wide oak staircase leads to two upper floors with 12 bedrooms (five ensuite)
and two more bathrooms. From the windows, you can see the knot garden, the
croquet lawn and the paddocks.
It doesn’t take much to imagine what it must look like by candlelight, full of
weekend guests, royally fed and entertained by Lord and Lady T. As a family
home, however, it doesn’t cut the mustard. It has the air of the commercial
venue it is, and is clearly designed for entertaining, not for family life.
When Juliet Carmen, the couple’s 19-year-olddaughter, is not at collegein
London, she occupies the grand but sombre “princess” room, with its dark
panelling and heavy drapes. As a child, she slept in a separate wing from
her parents and was turfed out of her room at weekends, when paying guests
arrived. Small wonder that she begged to be sent to boarding school, despite
once getting a £100 tip from a girlfriend of the prince of Oman.
Now, however, she loves the house, which is for sale for £1.75m, and plans to
buy it back some day. For every floor-board and tile here bears the imprint
of her father, who carried out a huge restoration of the property almost
single-handedly. The son of a cabinetmaker, Teksnes even built the
four-poster beds. He also nearly killed himself on several occasions –
mishaps included falling through the attic floor and being hit on the head
by a flying winch handle.
So, how did the family wind up here in the first place? In 1976, Teksnes, then
a golf pro, arrived in England and met and married Maria, a beauty therapist
and hairdresser. By 1984, sick of living in London, he persuaded her that
they should move to the country andrenovate a house. He joined the Society
for the Protection of Ancient Buildings and set about finding something to
rescue. He envisaged a cottage with a stream in the garden. She was thinking
of somewhere near London – she had never even heard of Shropshire.
Teksnes, however, has his own idiosyncratic way of doing things. In 1986, they
arrived at Colehurst in the dead of night to see the manor house, then
uninhabited and virtually derelict. “Bats were flying, lightning was
flashing – the only thing missing was the devil himself,” he recalls. He
would have driven home had Maria not insisted on staying overnight for a
quick tour in the morning. In daylight, he realised it was just the project
he was after.
The price was £60,000, and Teksnes thought it would take £30,000 to make the
house habitable, so he offered £30,000. “They accepted immediately, so I
felt a little panicked,” he recalls. “I went back the following weekend with
a sledgehammer.” He embarked on a rather invasive inspection tour, bashing
out pebble dash and knocking down plasterboard. “It was rotten. In another
five years, it would have crumbled to the ground.”
As a civil engineer, he realised that much more serious money would have to be
spent just to make the manor habitable – probably about £400,000 – so he cut
his offer to £20,000. Again, the owner accepted – again, Teksnes panicked.
“I went back and offered £15,000, and he accused me of being an idiot. He
refused to sell to me at any price.”
By now, though, Teksnes was determined to have it. He went to all four banks
in town, scraped together £20,000 in cash, took it to the seller’s
solicitor, plonked it on his desk and told him to phone his client, who was
in Hong Kong, saying: “Tell him he’s got 10 seconds to make up his mind.”
Six seconds later, Old Colehurst Manor was his. “I was stuck with a property
that has cost me £1m over the years,” Teksnes says. “If I’d known, I
wouldn’t have bought it.” Still, he received expert advice from English
Heritage, and the upgrading of the house’s listing from Grade II to Grade
II* meant grants of “a couple of hundred grand”. In return, the property had
to be open to the public 29 days a year for nine years.
Some of the biggest projects involved replacing the roof – which Teksnes
repegged himself – landscaping and the installation of antique carved
fireplaces, claw-foot baths and underfloor heating throughout. The walls are
made of wattle and daub: a lattice of wooden stakes (wattle) is covered with
a wet, plaster-like substance (daub) made from hair, dung, clay and straw.
“We got the dung from a dairy farmer, who came round with a tractor-load
that floated all over the place,” Teksnes says. The hair, which has to be
coarse and long, was harder to find. “I tried a few slaughterhouses to get
horses’ tails, but, in the end, we used llama hair from Argentina.”
Teksnes enjoyed every moment, despite the budget blowout: “It took five years,
but it was a fantastic time. I put the daub on with my bare hands.”
In 1994, the weekend house parties began. “The manor needed to earn money and,
at the same time, I got to do something I enjoyed, which was dress up,” he
says. It was a good business – Colehurst is 19 miles from Stafford, just 90
minutes from London by train – but hard work, so, since the late 1990s, the
couple have hired out the house as a wedding venue, with bedrooms available
for the party.
It has been fun, but, after 21 years of lording it at Old Colehurst, Bjorn and
Maria are heading overseas, to a huge modern log cabin they have built in
the mountains of Norway, with an indoor pool, a spa bath, a gym, a games
room and a proper teenage bedroom. This time, their neighbours will be
wolves and bears, which can be just as scary as the English gentry – but at
least they don’t stand on ceremony.
Old Colehurst Manor, with 7.25 acres, is for sale with Savills; 01952
239516, www.savills.co.uk. The
title is for sale by separate negotiation
