'I turned on the TV and actor Martin Clunes was sleeping in our bed'

When you're watching a TV series and see a striking home as the one of the leading characters, the backdrop and the setting for a significant amount of the story, how often do you wonder what it's like having your home used as a filming location?

Watching the new ITV drama Out There starring Martin Clunes as Welsh farmer Nathan Williams, a sprawling Welsh property built in the 1500s is the mesmerising home of this main character - a dark and moody historic house painted grey to match the ominous sky, setting the scene for this gripping story, that began on Sunday, January 19 and is still available to view on ITVX.

It's the family home of couple Gina and Toby and they absolutely loved the whole process, totally recommending the TV experience. Gina says it was fascinating to see behind-the scenes-filming at their working farm in Powys, meeting the cast, and being open to let Buffalo Pictures do whatever they wanted to transform their home for the drama. For more property stories sent to your inbox twice a week sign up to the property newsletter here

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Gina says: "Actually seeing some of our house and land on TV - it’s kind of a bit surreal. We've had to watch it twice now because the first time we were trying to figure out where the filming actually was, and then the second time we were watching it as if we were just watching a normal programme and really getting into the characters.

"In one of the scenes Martin is waking up in one of our beds! His bedroom is one of our rooms, basically it was quite a derelict room so I just said to the team 'you can do whatever you like with it', so they did! It’s still derelict inside it but it does look a little better now!

"I had to tell him his lovely pink house was about to be grey and I thought, 'oh this is going to go down well!'. But he just looked at me and said, 'ok' although he did want it to go back to pink at the end because that’s all he’s ever known. So they painted the whole house grey and then returned it back to pink. It was the first time I’d seen the whole house in one colour and it was quite nice to see it."

Gina, aged 55, lives with her husband Toby at the Grade II* listed farm near the village of Llyswen that has been in his family for generations but over that time it has become challenging to keep it going, to try and renovate it, and Gina thinks it will take decades to even just restore some of the ancient structure and interior.

The house is such a gem that Gina has always thought it would make a fantastic filming location and it is purely by chance that it ended up as one of the stars of Out There.

She says: "This house is quite extraordinary really, I work as a clairvoyant medium and so every time I had a client visit for a reading I’d tell them a little bit about it and I kept saying, 'I really need to put it up for TV work' and then I had a client who said, 'hold on, I met someone purely by chance and he’s a location manager' - so I emailed him details."

Almost two years went by and then one day a car pulled up outside and the house had the potential to be cast as the primary property in the tense drama. Gina says: "Martin then turned up with his lovely wife Philippa Braithwaite who is a famous producer and they co-own the company Buffalo Pictures and they just said, 'yup, this is what we want'."

Before filming started the house was prepared for its starring role and although the exterior and barns were used extensively, only some of the house appears in the series as a surprising twist to this filming location tale.

Gina explains: "When you come into the house the wallpaper on the left is incredibly old and they got a specialist in to replicate the whole of the wallpaper, because they built a copy of our hallway in a studio. They copied our hallway identically, so some of the shots are not here.

"The kitchen is in the studio too, but it’s kind of a copy of ours but bigger because they needed to fit in all the camera crew, and theirs is blue and ours is cream. But they loved the design of the kitchen and they loved all the higgledy-piggledy oak beams and kind of copied that - the lounge isn’t ours either they built that in the studio as well. The bedrooms and some of the hall are at the house."

The couple watched as the team transformed some of their home into the TV set that was needed. Gina says: "Because I used to have horses and my horse stuff was still here they borrowed a few bits and they brought quite a lot as well.

"There’s a small, really old, I guess Victorian tack room which was a hell of a mess and they cleared that out and made it into a beautiful tack room and then they put stables in the barns. The tack room is back to being the sheep feed room now, so it’s back to being covered in cobwebs and dust but it did look amazing for a time!"

There was some onsite building as well with Gina saying that the large log shed viewers see at the front of the house being a new addition that the team built just for the filming, taking it down when they had finished filming.

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Gina adds: "Inside they built a temporary door in our hallway and it’s been so useful I asked them to leave it. There were a few things that they borrowed from us including our lovely antique hall stand and they did take that backwards and forwards between the house and the studio."

Although Gina kept out of the way during the approximately 10 days the team were at their home, she did have a chance to lurk and watch some of the filming process. She says sometimes the crew and cast would turn up really early and work late into the evening, and sometimes take up to 27 shots of the same scene. The over-riding memory Gina has of the experience was how friendly the crew and cast were.

She says: "Everyone was lovely, Martin’s team and Dragon Studios - I can honestly say they were brilliant. Martin was really friendly, he got on really well with my husband because they are both outdoor, farming kind of people. Toby looked after Martin when he was around the cattle and the sheep, and he was also on call just in case, as they used the barns and the land too.

"One morning I snuck into my kitchen to make a cup of tea and suddenly Martin’s knocking on the door and he just wanted to come in for a chat, I couldn’t believe it, it was just so sweet and friendly. Louie Ashbourne Serkis, who plays Martin's character's son, was incredibly polite - they sat in my lounge while they were waiting in-between takes and scenes and he was so friendly and polite; they all were."

Large trucks and catering vans trundling through the lanes of this sleepy corner of Powys north of Brecon are an unusual sight so it wasn't long before the village nearby realised something exciting was happening up at Toby and Gina's farm.

Gina says: "One night I got home and the whole road was just a mass of security and lights and so then, of course, the whole village knew. But everyone is so friendly here, I can honestly tell you the village were amazing.

"I just had a couple of friends saying 'can we just come and say hello' which was fine of course, but most people kept distant, they didn’t get in the way at all, they were amazing - I just think the whole village were just excited that something different was happening.

"We wanted to give filming a go, to try it, as everyone knows farming has been pretty badly knocked at the moment in every direction so I think if this can encourage other farmers perhaps to let people come in and film, why not?"

But now Gina has experienced filming at her home she says her imagination has been spinning on the possibilities of more TV and maybe movie work as a way of helping in the battle of trying to restore this beautiful old house, parts of which are crumbling due to roof issues and which she admits is 'beyond us'.

Gina says she can imagine the scene - a vehicle drawing up to the front of the house in total darkness, a full moon, and fog swirling - she thinks it would make a perfect house for a horror movie so you might be seeing the house lose its pink overcoat again sometime in the future, replaced by a colour more suited to a scary movie.

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