“There’s no more pigeon poo!” beams Keith Brymer Jones. As a response to “how are things going?” that one takes the biscuit. To be honest to the Great Pottery Throw Down’s chief judge, few can say they’ve been so blighted by avian guano as he.
In September 2022, Brymer Jones and his spouse, actress and textile designer Marj Hogarth paid £200,000 in money to purchase their first house collectively: Capel Salem, a Grade II-listed chapel in Pwllheli on the Llŷn Peninsula, in north-west Wales.
Quite a discount, not less than by sq. footage (the chapel itself and adjoining Sunday college complete 6,500 sq ft), however the reality of renovating the constructing, which was deserted for 14 years previous to their arrival, proved trickier.
The pigeons had moved in and left seven inches of poisonous poo of their wake, fungus was in every single place and each time it rained, water was seeping into the constructing. Not ultimate.
“There’s no such thing as smooth progression with a project like this,” admits Hogarth on a Zoom name from their brilliant pink parlour – which, I’m instructed, is in a state of chaos as they await a bathroom to be plumbed in. “You just have to tackle it bit by bit and try not to get overwhelmed.”
Brymer Jones and Hogarth’s efforts to make the property liveable once more shaped the backbone of the primary two sequence of Channel 4’s Our Welsh Chapel Dream. Now with the Sunday college constructing completed as of final April (the decrease flooring reworked into a stylish, trendy house, whereas the principle corridor has change into Brymer Jones’s pottery studio), the couple have moved in.
