For Sarah, 2013 had been a difficult year. She was struggling after losing both her parents and threw herself into her job as an architect to distract herself. “My dad had a stroke and my mum had cancer in a short space of time,” she says. “I was a single mum to two children who were at university. I’d always been passionate about my work but it became my focus.” Living in the small town of Eye in Suffolk, she worked mainly on modest, local jobs. One day, a builder she knew asked if she would be interested in helping a client near Ipswich. “It was a big house far from where I was living,” she says. “But it looked like such an interesting project that I said yes.”
The client was Chris, a single father with grownup children, who worked as a banker in London and commuted from Suffolk. “We moved here in the 90s, but six years later I lost my wife to cancer,” he says. “The house had so many reminders of her that I decided to buy somewhere else, a 16th-century property that I could renovate.” By 2014 he had already spent five years working on the house, but was struggling with planning permission. “My builder told me that he knew an architect who specialised in working with English Heritage.”
