It began as a simple plan: a young couple would bid on a modest, fire-damaged apartment in Glasgow. What they got instead was a crumbling 120-year-old Victorian villa in the Scottish Highlands—and the opportunity of a lifetime.
When Claire Segeren and Cal Hunter sat in that auction house in 2018, they thought the rigamarole of property bidding was straightforward. Claire, then a neuroscience graduate from Canada, had been gearing up for medical school in Glasgow.
Cal, a carpenter from Hull, saw property renovation as his calling. Their plan: find an undervalued flat, fix it up, sell it, and use the gains to start a life together in Scotland.
What they didn’t expect was the auction catalogue swap. As it turns out, the sheets don’t always keep pace with last-minute changes. A derelict unit in a Victorian villa—Jameswood Villa, located north of Dunoon—was quietly inserted just before the Glasgow lot.
Cal, following along in the booklet, mistakenly raised a bid for the villa, believing it to be the flat. When no one else bid, his £10,000 offer won. Legally binding. Completely accidental.
He dashed out in panic and called Claire. Her reaction was calm, almost daring: “What’s the worst that can happen? We just got a property for £10,000.”
When Cal visited the site shortly afterward, what greeted him was far worse than the modest listing had hinted. The villa was derelict—roof leaking, structural timbers rotting, walls crumbling. The auction photos used on promotional material were a decade old. It had been abandoned for decades. A structural engineer even advised demolition.
Embracing The Chaos
Staring down a ruin, Claire and Cal faced a choice: walk away, or pour themselves into that wreck. They chose the latter. But first, they had to own the whole building. The villa had been subdivided into four apartments.
One unit had already been sold to someone else at auction; another was unsold; and the fourth had an owner they couldn’t immediately trace. Over several months, they tracked down each owner, negotiated, and eventually bought the full building—spending roughly £40,000 in total.
Living arrangements at the time were austere. Without functioning water or electricity, they parked a van—or later, a caravan—on site and lived among half-finished walls, exposed beams, and damp floors.
Claire served behind bar shifts; Cal took contracting carpentry work. They scraped by, sourced reclaimed materials, and leveraged support from family and followers on social media.
They documented nearly every step publicly—on Instagram and via a blog called What Have We Dunoon?. Over time, their audience swelled into the hundreds of thousands.
The Long Haul To Home
They initially estimated the full restoration would take two years and cost between £100,000 and £120,000. In reality, it stretched to four years and landed close to the upper estimate.
Every step was painstaking. They replaced rotten floor joists, structural beams, and damaged foundations. The walls had to be repointed with lime mortar suitable for the climate. They installed insulation, rewired the electric system, re-plumbed, re-roofed—each task fraught with surprise after surprise.
At one point Cal discovered the building had sunk—lifting the roof back into position was like playing structural Jenga. One of the more dramatic challenges came when they needed to find the cut electricity cable buried under the grounds. Professional electricians failed. Then, while digging drainage trenches, Cal stumbled upon it.
Similarly, they had to track and replace broken water supply and wastewater pipes, sourcing almost every component by hand. To stretch their budget, they reused or upcycled materials wherever possible: salvaged doors, vintage radiators stripped and repainted, kitchen units offered gratis by locals, and wrangled deals on secondhand timber and appliances.
Claire even crafted a stained-glass window and reused Victorian wood paneling. For insulation, they used sheep wool—both locally available and ecologically aligned with their vision.
Throughout the ordeal, emotional strain tested their bond. “Building a house with your partner—and living and working in close quarters—is tough on any relationship,” Claire later admitted.
The Fourth Point: Sharing The Journey And Its Deeper Meaning
From the start, Claire and Cal committed to transparency. Their blog laid out plans, costs, successes, and mishaps. They posted photos of half-built walls, scaffolding, tool piles. They invited followers into the mess as well as the triumph. Their Instagram following—eventually over 300,000 people—became a community of support, advice, encouragement, and accountability.
But that transparency wasn’t just performative. It was integral to how they financed, motivated, and sustained themselves. They coaxed discounts and donations, found collaborators, and converted their narrative into rentable value. When part of the villa reopened as holiday flats, they invited some followers as guests—a symbolic return of trust.
A visitor described the effect: stepping into one of the flats is like walking through their story—Victorian solidity meets modern light and the patina of restoration. The journey became tourism; the renovation, performance; the home, shared legacy.
Moreover, their story speaks to architecture, heritage, and sustainable housing. Rather than demolish and rebuild, they resurrected something thought lost. They honored local materials and techniques (lime render, reclaimed stone, native wool), blending the old and new. In doing so, they crafted not just a house but a narrative about value, patience, and rootedness.
The fourth point is this: their mistake became a mission. They built more than rooms—they built trust, audience, identity, and a blueprint for others who believe beauty can be resurrected, one brick at a time.
Today: Home, Guest Flats, And Future Plans
By mid-2023, after scaffolding came down in May and certificates were signed in July, Jameswood Villa was legally habitable. They converted the four subdivided units into three: the top half is their family home, and two downstairs apartments are holiday lets. They currently charge around £125 per night for a two-bedroom unit.
Claire and Cal now view the villa not simply as a lived space but as the proving ground for future projects. They speak of continuing to restore neglected buildings, always with sustainability, honesty, and community at heart.
Asked whether she would recommend this to others, Claire’s response is tempered: “I would never recommend this to anybody” in a literal sense—because she knows how unpredictable, exhausting, and financially precarious it can be. But she quickly adds: “It’s an incredibly rewarding journey.”
Reflection: What This Story Teaches
This story is about more than an auction slip-up or DIY drama. It’s a meditation on risk, creativity, ownership, and narrative. Claire and Cal could have walked away. They could have felt foolhardy. Instead, they leaned into the mess, chose transparency, built a community, honored a building’s past, and turned a nearly impossible gamble into a home with soul.
In a world driven by fast gains and polished façades, their journey whispers another path: deep work, honest sharing, humility in ambition, and the conviction that mistakes can be doorways.
If a wrong bid, a rotting villa, and four years of effort can yield not just a home but a story worth telling—then perhaps we all have missteps waiting to be reclaimed.
