They say everyone needs a hobby, and Stephen Yeomans’s hobby is renovating houses. At 57, Yeomans has a demanding day job as a marketing strategist at Apple, but he’s turned reinventing homes into something of a private sport. He is now on his eighth.
If you think you have seen him somewhere before, he appeared on Grand Designs in 2016 with his modernist showstopper The Rusty Metal House, in Lewes, East Sussex. Apart from some initial objections from the locals, who called his Cor-Ten steel-clad house a “rust bucket” and a “carbuncle”, Yeomans’s episode of Grand Designs was uncharacteristically smooth sailing — and the house went on to win several architectural awards.
Not that he sees himself as a serial property flipper. “I just live with girlfriends who get sick of me and we’ve gotta split and sell the house,” he jokes. Sadly, he has split from his wife, Anita, whom he married while building The Rusty Metal House, and with whom he has a daughter, Beatrix, now ten.
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After selling The Rusty Metal House, the couple went on to renovate The Sussex House together, a 4,000 sq ft four-storey, five bedroom Georgian house on Lewes High Street. “I think we actually made some money on that one,” Yeomans says. But the project coincided, in classic Grand Designs-style, with the end of his relationship, and it also cured him of any desire to live in a townhouse ever again.
The Old Bakery is one of the oldest buildings in Lindfield
CIARAN MCCRICKARD FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES
“Growing up, I lived with my grandparents in a council house, and my parents lived on a hideous housing estate on the edge of Plymouth, so I always aspired to live in a massive house,” he says. “But actually I’m incredibly forgetful and I’m constantly wandering around looking for things.”
The modest medieval proportions of The Old Bakery, his latest creation, was part of the appeal for Yeomans. Although he bought it ostensibly to live alone after his divorce, with Beatrix coming and going, this renovation turned into his biggest, most passionate project to date.
He says: “I’ve spent a fortune on this place and I’m not going to make much money on it. This was never a commercial development project. If it was, I wouldn’t have taken it to this level or gone this far.”
Before and after: the shop / kitchen-dining area (slide to see both pictures in full)
Dating from about 1360, The Old Bakery is one of the oldest surviving buildings in Lindfield, a bucolic village with a common and duck pond about a ten-minute drive from Haywards Heath in West Sussex. Generations of its villagers have grown up on bread, buns and brandy snaps from the bakery. Locals still speak of the doughnuts.
The bakery was owned by only three families from 1796 until its closure in 2019. Even today, you could mistake the house for a working bakery. Yeomans has placed hanging shelves in the front window facing the high street (loaded with artisan vases rather than loaves) in homage to the building’s heritage. Thanks to some excellent soundproofing work, the high street chatter is inaudible on the inside — even though, Yeomans says, there is plenty of local curiosity about what became of the bakery.
Before and after: the drawing room
“I was expecting a massive amount of opposition,” he says, “because when I built [The Rusty Metal House] in Lewes, I had masses of opposition, and it took me two or three years to get that through on appeal. I thought here I would have a similar kind of thing, but bizarrely I don’t think there was one letter of opposition. They wanted something done [about it].”
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Yeomans loves a home on the high street. “I lived in Amsterdam for a long time, and you’re really on top of the street there. [The Dutch] have a very different attitude towards it,” he says. “[Being on the high street] makes you feel like you’re more connected to the village.”
Before and after: one of the two bathrooms
By the time Yeomans discovered the bakery, which was featured in Country Life magazine, the place was a crumbly relic. The baker had died, the building had grown semi-derelict, and the interior was a mismatched jumble of vinyl flooring, odd 1960s windows, multiple floor levels, a grim fireplace and even an external toilet. Bakery detritus was still strewn around as if the last batch had just been pulled from the oven.
Yeomans fell in love with the romance of it all and bought the house in December 2022 for about £750,000.
Before and after: the front entrance
The Old Bakery, while by no means small, is more a manageable size than The Sussex House, but what he shed in square footage, he made up for in complex heritage restrictions. “I’d done grade II listed before,” he says, “but not a grade II* listed. It’s a different beast. You have to get English Heritage involved and there are so many more things that you cannot touch.”
A conservation officer, whom Yeomans describes as “militant”, insisted on almost a year of planning discussions, followed by six to nine months marketing the premises as a potential shop. This meant that he could not start work for nearly two years.
Adventurously, Yeomans had not done a survey — “it was a total state; there was no point’ — but the bakery surpassed even his low expectations in terms of how stale it was.
Every time something was opened up, another problem revealed itself. The sole plate was rotten and needed replacing. The walls and ceilings all had to be relined and lime plastered. The attempt to restore the vinyl floor cost thousands before being abandoned entirely. “I had to take up the bricks [from the original flooring], salvage what I could, and find some other bricks that I could match in.”
Even the roof, which he expected to patch up, turned into a six-figure odyssey because his contractors found timber elements up there so unusual they claimed never to have seen anything similar in Sussex before.
In total Yeomans, estimates he spent between £600,000 and £700,000 to “restore the fabric of the house” with a modern interior aesthetic.
One of the four bedrooms
CIARAN MCCRICKARD FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES
The study
CIARAN MCCRICKARD FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES
Once the bones of the house were stabilised, he turned to the surfaces. The walls are finished in breathable Earthborn paints over fresh lime plastering. The beams have been treated with tar oil, because the conservation officer forbade him to lighten them.
Wide oak boards, micro-cement flooring and reclaimed brickwork line the ground floor, and new steel-framed glazed doors, selected to mirror the existing Crittall ones, bring light to the back of the house without compromising the character at the front.
There is a fully restored cellar housing utilities and laundry, and a small staircase from the snug leads up to a secret office tucked into the footprint of the former outside loo.
The kitchen is the heart of the house, a Plain English beauty with thick marble and oak worktops, a four-oven electric Aga and an oversized Victorian Belfast sink whose original taps were restored by a man who normally tends to the plumbing at Claridge’s.
The adjoining dining area leads to a formal drawing room where a vintage Jotul wood-burning stove sits beneath exposed medieval timbers. From there, steel-framed doors open on to the brick-paved courtyard, enclosed behind an electric gate.
The bakery was closed in 2019 after more than 200 years of trading
The rear of the property today
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Upstairs, the main bedroom has a vaulted ceiling painstakingly revealed from behind centuries of interventions, and a walk-in dressing room. The bathrooms blend original finds with indulgent touches: an art deco basin, a freestanding copper bath with nickel taps, and brassware by Barber Wilsons and Czech & Speake.
Then there is the barn at the rear, listed by virtue of being within the curtilage of the main house. Yeomans transformed it from a derelict Victorian shell into a two-storey hideaway with a ground-floor office and a guest bedroom up a ladder on a mezzanine level.
The rollercoaster of life may be the reason that Yeomans has lived in so many houses, but his enthusiasm for a tough project and impeccable taste means that he has renovated homes for his family and friends too.
“My degree is in art and design history, so I know a lot about furniture, and I’ve bought and sold quite a lot of it.” He shrugs at the idea of turning this into a full-time job. “No one is willing to pay me to do it. That’s the main challenge,” he says, laughing.
In true Yeomans style, the barn’s sofa was once a battered red leather relic, now reborn in a monochrome Chanel-esque weave sourced through a friend who imports Belgian fabrics.
Yeomans is now selling the house as he plans to move back to Lewes in East Sussex
CIARAN MCCRICKARD FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES
Throughout the house, Yeomans’s collector’s instinct is delightfully unchecked. He has collected and restored a dizzying array of mid-century statement pieces over the years that he recycles through his homes, along with his playful photographic wall art (mainly depicting dogs). His outsized bedroom ceiling light, for example, is a refurbished Vitra piece that would normally retail for about £5,000, with a years-long waiting list, but which he sourced through a friend for £1,000.
“I think this style goes quite well in this kind of house, but whoever buys it next will probably put more comfortable furniture in here,” he admits.
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After he lived for only a few months in The Old Bakery, Yeomans put it on the market, chain-free, for £1.75 million through Hamptons and Jackson-Stops, the same agent from whom he bought it after seeing that fateful Country Life article.
Yeomans did not expect to sell so soon, but life has come at him again. He’s going back to Lewes to live with his new girlfriend, who happens to be closer to the school his daughter wants to attend. “It’s a real shame to sell it,” he says. “I poured my heart and soul into it.”
He leaves a home with centuries baked into its beams and proof that whatever life throws at him, he can always rise to the occasion.