We feared home was cursed

WHEN Ian and Gigi Wason moved into Harpsden Court, an ancient, creeper-covered manor house on the outskirts of Henley, they were given a present.

It wasn’t an ordinary gift, but Harpsden Court isn’t an ordinary house.

The home of the lords of the manor of Harpsden since the time of the Domesday Book, the Grade II* listed property is hidden from view by the heavy gates of a large stone archway.

These open to reveal the Gothic revival front of the house, across a grassy circle with a sundial in its centre and the woods beyond.

Mrs Wason says the house was “completely wild” when they bought it in 2019. But even the fairytale-like ivy coming in at the windows and the bats in the roof did not prepare her for what was thrust into her hands as they first crossed the threshold.

She said: “When we finally got the house, the woman who owned it said to me, ‘I’ve got a present for you. You won’t like it, but whoever has this house has to have it.’

“I was like, ‘Oh, okay’ and she said, ‘Here you go.’

“She handed me a nest with an egg and two dead mice, like fossilised, and said, ‘This is yours.’ I took it and shivers went through my body. I thought, ‘Oh no, I’ve just been cursed.’”

Mrs Wason, an interior designer who is originally from South Africa, was so shocked that at first she didn’t know what to say.

“I was like, ‘Oh, gosh’ and I thought, ‘Oh, this is such fun, like, I love these things. I’m going to put a big glass dome over it and it’ll be a talking point.’

“But when I spoke to someone about it who sort of does energy, she said, ‘You just cannot hold on to that. You have to get rid of it. Just burn it immediately’, which we did. We have a photo of it but we didn’t want a curse.”

The Wasons recently celebrated the fourth anniversary of moving into the house, which they have been restoring and renovating ever since. No impact of a curse has been found so far.

Mr Wason, a social entrepreneur, grew up in Henley but met his wife while he was living and working in Cape Town.

The couple, who have three young daughters, first saw Harpsden Court in 2016.

Mrs Wason said: “Ian had always said to me he wanted to move back to England.

“We were staying with his parents, who lived in Fawley at the time, and he said, ‘There’s a house in Henley on the market, let’s go to have a look’.

“I saw it online and I really wanted to love it, so much so that I even went to see a school for the girls. We were like, ‘This is done. Perfect’.

“But when we arrived it was so overwhelming in terms of the amount that needed to be done.

“I’m South African, so everything to me is new and this was just not my comfort zone. Huge gothic fireplaces, dark panelling, huge rooms… everything was freezing cold. Ivy was coming in through the windows.

“There were bats, there was a family of crows, sparrows, mice, rats. It was like a zoo.

“I just said, ‘Absolutely no way. I’ll just be rotting away here and lonely.’ I didn’t know anyone in Henley and it was freezing cold. It was like going back 200 years.

“So we were like, ‘Oh, it’s a shame that it didn’t work out.’ It wasn’t what we had thought it would be.”

Instead, the couple bought a house in central London, for themselves and their girls, Clementine, who is now 10, Josephine, eight, and Madeline, four.

But Mrs Wason found herself missing the open space of South Africa and so, three years later, they decided to view Harpsden Court again as no one had put in an offer in the meantime.

She said: “Ian said, ‘You know, that house is still on the market, why don’t we go and have another look?’

“It was the most glorious summer and when we came up the driveway it was like a different house. It was like something had been lifted, a veil from our eyes, and I really do believe that it was waiting for us.

“We became obsess’ed with the house — obsessed. It was like I was possessed.”

They bought it in 2019 and didn’t bother with a survey due to its condition.

The family camped in the house during that first summer before any work took place.

They were joined by extended family and friends, with everyone taking turns to use the one working bath into which they had to pour buckets of water over their heads — or swim in the lake.

The buckets also came in useful when it rained to catch the water dripping through the roof. Mrs Wason said: “It was sort of wild in the house as there wasn’t any furniture and it was so overgrown.

“Madeline was then a baby and I’d leave her bottle downstairs and when I came back a rat had eaten it. It was brutal.

“There were rooms we hadn’t gone into and then just discovered. It was like a wild adventure.”

Mr Wason added: “If social services had come and found us living here with our three children they would have immediately confiscated them.”

Over the summer the couple busied themselves with work in the garden while the girls played with Victorian children’s prams and toys that they had found in the attic.

Mr Wason said: “I spent the entire summer with a chainsaw in my hand. I mean, every bit of brickwork was covered in ivy and Virginia creeper. There were self-seeded trees everywhere.

“It was just getting it back and every single day we would discover something new, some old statue or something.”

They also discovered problems with the house. “Whatever you can have, we had it,” said Mrs Wason. “Rising damp, dry rot, leaks, electrics, plumbing. We even had Japanese knotweed. You name it, we had it.”

Harpsden Court has a jumble of different architectural ages and styles from across the
centuries.

Parts of the remaining roof structure in the Tudor tower have been dated back to the 16th century, while a large Georgian wing and a Victorian servants’ wing were added later.

A wood-panelled bedroom at the front of the house is called the Queen Mary room because Queen Mary of Teck, the wife of George V, is believed to have stayed there.

The building was used as a hospital during the First World War.

The Wasons say that living in the house before renovating it allowed them to get a feel for how it worked.

They used a photograph album from the 1890s, which they were given by a previous owner, to help guide the renovations. It shows the house in that period, complete with suits of armour, dark oak panelling, dried flowers and stags’ heads mounted on the walls.

“It solved a lot of questions we had about the house, like windows and certain things that we just couldn’t figure out,” said Mrs Wason. “The album sort of pieced it together for us.

“It also helped with planning permission to show Historic England. We were like, ‘This is what it was, so we’re not actually doing something new, we’re just restoring it.”

The couple’s first challenge was to remove the asbestos in the attic, which had been used to lag water pipes in the Forties, and to get the house watertight as parts of the roof were open to the sky.

As if this wasn’t difficult enough, the attic’s resident bats — a protected species — were an additional challenge.

Mr Wason said: “We had amusing discussions between the bat people and the asbestos removal people with me in the middle.

“The bat people were like, ‘We need to get in there while they [asbestos removers] are doing it’ and I was like, ‘I’m pretty sure you can’t do that because they’ll be in hazmat suits.’

“Then the bat people said, ‘Okay, we’ve got a plan — we’re going to train the asbestos removal people to look after the bats.’

“I then I had to go to the asbestos people and say, ‘This is their plan.’

“They were like, ‘We’ve got a better plan — we’re going to train the bat people in asbestos removal.’

“Then it was stand-off, which eventually asbestos won.”

Unlike the bats, which were rehoused in new bat boxes put up around the estate, the Wasons still didn’t have a watertight roof as three roofing companies declined to quote for the work.

Eventually, the couple managed to cobble together a team of local roofers, who were all well over retirement age but had the skills and expertise to do the intricate leadwork and retiling.

They spent five months on the roof, managing to save and reuse 90 per cent of the original tiles.

Mr Wason said: “When the Historic England lady came, she was looking at all these guys and said, ‘It’s a bit like care in the community here.’

“I said, ‘Yeah, their average age is 72 but they’ve got all the old crafts.’ They did the roof. Nobody else wanted to do it because we said they couldn’t use new tiles. These guys in their seventies were up on the roof come rain or shine.”

When the country went into lockdown in the spring of 2020, the couple were worried that the work would be held up.

Mrs Wason recalled: “On the first day all the builders left. Then the next day they were all back on site because their wives didn’t want them at home.

“Because the house is so vast, they could work. Most of them were outside anyway, like on the roof, and miles away from each other. And because they were self-employed, we said to them it was their choice.”

Mr Wason, a former member of Kensington and Chelsea Borough Council, was the project manager.

He said: “In a previous life I worked in the tax department of Deloitte. That’s a bit like doing a project like this because the electricians wanted to do their thing, the plumbers wanted to do their thing, the roof, the asbestos… I had to kind of sit on top and basically get them to all work together.

“Lockdown was amazing for us because we were at home all day every day.

“I don’t think I’ve ever worked so hard. I was up at 5.30am doing work emails and council emails and then at site meetings at 7.30am to get everyone going for the day, doing a few Zoom calls around lunchtime and then back out there.

“I pretended that the camera on my computer was broken because I just couldn’t have people seeing me covered in soil.”

As work on the house continued, hidden features were revealed, including an original stone archway, part of the Tudor tower in the oldest part of the house, which had been adapted to accommodate a modern doorway and plastered over.

The Wasons found newspapers in the walls from 1827, which allowed them to date the
alterations. A well was also discovered in the passage of the Victorian wing.

The couple were keen to retain the character of the house during the work.

“That was our biggest struggle with our builders,” said Mrs Wason.

“I think they thought I was a crazy person because they were quite sort of London-ish builders and said I would go mad as if I saw one straight wall or perfectly skimmed line or neat corner. I just do not want that.

“My biggest fear was we’d lose the character of the house and I didn’t want it to be neat and
perfect. I’m an interior designer but this is so not my area of expertise.

“New homes? Sure. Renovate, choose taps, tiles, paint, colours — easy-peasy but not when you’re dealing with ancient stained-glass windows and English Heritage and old panelling and old wood and trying to restore old wallpapers and rooms.”

Mrs Wason has searched online for suitable furnishings to blend the different styles of the house into something cohesive.

She said: “We’ve done a lot of auctions because we wanted it to almost look timeless, as if the furniture had always been here.

“But at the same time, we haven’t inherited granny’s furniture with the house, so it’s a real blend with some fresh pieces.

“We had two containers sent from South Africa and we inherited a lot of Ian’s family’s furniture, so it’s a bit of a marriage. It’s our home, I’m not restoring a museum. It’s more organic.”

The couple’s priority was to connect the oldest part of the building with the newer additions, so that it works as one family home.

With the help of architect Ben Pentreath, they have also restored the back part of the house, which was built in the Georgian era with large, classically proportioned windows, by removing an Edwardian bay window and porch to restore the original symmetry of the façade.

Some areas of the old house, such as the original kitchen with its huge range, have been left as they are.

Newer areas, such as the family kitchen, still incorporate original features, such as the green and white tiles behind the new range which were taken from a bath surround from 1910.

Still on the wall is the old servants’ bell board, which shows the names of rooms such as the “pond room”, “Egyptian room”, “library”, “flower room’ and “day nursery”.

These references to the old house co-exist with South African-influenced basket hanging lights and wall lights.

The old billiards room is now the family’s sitting room but the door still shows children’s height measurements going back to 1873 and the rules of the game.

The family are also continuing the traditions of previous occupiers by holding birthday parties for their daughters in the music room upstairs which has a domed ceiling and is decorated with plaster details designed by Humphrey Gainsborough.

The family were living in one of the cottages, where Mr Wason’s parents now live, while the renovations were underway before moving into the Victorian wing.

In their first night in the main house, in November 2021, they invited 35 people to stay to
celebrate.

Mr Wason recalled: “We put the kids to bed and then we sat down at the table to have our supper and suddenly a bell starts going, the servant’s bell. We didn’t know what it was. We’re like, ‘What is that?’

“I went upstairs and walked into Maddie’s room, who was three at the time, and this hand shot up with an empty bottle of milk in it and she said: ‘More milky, more milky’.

“I was like, ‘Oh my god, I’m going to have to disconnect these things.”

Although the Wasons have been careful to honour the history of Harpsden Court wherever possible, some aspects are entirely new to bring it up to 21st century sustainability standards, including 10 miles of pipes at the bottom of the lake for a ground source heat pump to heat the house.

Mrs Wason says her favourite part about the restoration project was uncovering the house’s secrets. She now has her own own metal detector after a local enthusiast helped her to search for historical artefacts within the grounds.

She hopes to put together a little museum of her finds, which include medieval buckles found in the ha ha, a pendant from the coronation of Edward VII and a George III coin, which were found in the woods.

A sign for “Henley-on-Thames station” was found buried in the garden.

Mr Wason said his favourite find was a plaque dedicated to “the glorious summer of 1906”, illustrated by earth, water and fire, a mysterious reference which they are still trying to unravel.

Some of the finds have been quite literally explosive.

Mr Wason explained: “We found an old Luger in the lake, so we researched that. After the First World War the big prize for British soldiers to bring back was a German officer’s pistol, so whenever they could, they pinched them.

“Then on the ships on the way over from Calais to Dover when they were decommissioned, it came over the Tannoy that anyone found with a Luger would be court martialled.

“So apparently there are hundreds of thousands of Lugers in the Channel because everyone just chucked them overboard.

“But somebody obviously kept theirs and came here. It was a hospital in the First World War and they must have got a bit nervous and chucked it in the lake. We found it and masses of ammunition.

“When we cleared the self-seeded trees in the lake, we had a big bonfire in the middle and suddenly these shots were going off. These bullets that had been in the lake probably since those times were still live.” Mrs Wason was horrified to discover a door in the attic, which she thought had the word “Clemmie” written in the dust on it.

“It really freaked us out,” she said, “but actually it said, ‘Clean me’.”

Her imagination was fuelled by reading a horror novel about a weird spirit that lives in a house and starts playing tricks on people.

Mrs Wason said: “Everyone who came here went, ‘Oh my gosh, how are you living in this house? It’s very creepy.’

“But I feel like we’ve breathed fresh life into it and my children will go anywhere, skip anywhere — they think it’s just amazing.”

She noticed strange coincidences and parallels when researching the house’s history.

When she found digitised diaries of Elizabeth Hall, who had lived there 200 years ago, she contacted her descendants who sent her the original diaries to keep with the house. Mrs Wason said: “Since I read the diary really weird things have happened and ideas have come to me from nowhere.

“We’ve got the walled garden and I thought, ‘I’m going to do a medicine wheel of herbs, a medicine garden. I’d been researching old herbs that are not common herbs that we use now.

‘Then when I got the diary, one of the books was a cookbook with a lot of the recipes for things like a sore throat and they used a lot of the herbs that I had planted.”

Mrs Hall was friends with the Stonor and Phillimore families, jus as Mrs Wason is now with their descendants.

She said: “I said to my friends, gosh, 200 years later, we’re still doing the same thing — ‘Went into town, went to Lady Phillimore for tea with the children’. We were doing the same thing.” Mrs Wason hadn’t anticipated the public role that came with the house. She explained: “Historically, this house has always been the one to host the coronation and jubilee celebrations.

“It was also a bit hard when we moved in because a lot of people in the village have been here for years and almost have a sense of ownership of the house.

“There was a lack of trust, certainly in the first six months when we were basically stripping everything back, particularly in the garden, working out what we had and how to restore it.

“No matter how many times you told people, ‘No, we’re restoring the house’, there’s always going to be an element of doubt.

“We live in the village, so we don’t want people saying things about us and don’t want to have an argument with anyone. It has been an interesting learning curve.” She has also sought out local help with the restoration by documenting the work on Instagram, where she shows the changes that have been made to the house to her 10,000
followers.

Mrs Wason said: “Starting the Instagram account was the best thing ever because people have a way to contact me. All sorts started writing to me and telling me information about the house.

“Like upstairs there’s this wild wallpaper and they said, ‘Have you found the little characters in it?’ We’re talking 50 years ago when this family, the Nobles’, their children put stickers of naked nymphs on the wallpaper.

“This is more than a house, it’s a sort of a living thing in a way.

“It has been an adventure with the restoration and renovation but it’s the uncovering of the past that has been the most fun.

“We are trying to be like the new chapter of the house and we’re going to have this beautiful home.”