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Some days, Eric Murray and his partner Thea Lyle just stand in their living room and breathe it all in. “We literally stand back and gaze in awe,” he says. “We’ve achieved everything we wanted to. It’s still sinking in.”
It’s pretty much the first time Eric has stood still in months. He has spent every spare moment for the past year hammering, sawing, sanding and painting to restore the 112-year-old villa from its near-original condition.
The two-time Olympic gold medallist loves a challenge, so when he bought the house near the centre of Cambridge last summer, he set himself the goal of renovating it in record time.
“It needed full rejuvenation, from levelling the floors to moving the walls around to replacing the roof,” he says. “I’ve put in some big shifts to get it done, but the ridiculous number of hours, the working past midnight, the weekends, the endless helpers, the endless decisions… it has all been worth it.”
It was a major renovation, and in hindsight he reckons it would almost have been easier to build new. “It’s not starting from scratch – it’s more than that,” he says. “We didn’t just have to paint the walls, we had to peel off all the old wallpaper first. As we peeled back the layers it felt like a
