ALEX Main spent years searching for his dream home only to discover it had been right under his nose all along. As a child growing up in a North Yorkshire village, he never knew what lay behind the tall hedge he passed every day.

Having left to travel, study and work elsewhere, it wasn’t until he returned to the area to settle with his young family that he noticed a ‘development opportunity’ sign, along with a photograph of the three adjoining 100-year-old barns that lay behind the hedge, as he drove past one day.

Without even seeing inside, he knew instantly this was what he had been looking for. He texted his wife Emma immediately. “I didn’t need to see any more. I told her: ‘I think I’ve found the house of our dreams’,” he says.

With Emma expecting their third child and the couple boldly deciding to go it alone without the help of an architect, this was just the sort of project which would have had viewers of the TV programme Grand Designs on the edge of their seats. Yet, within a matter of months, they converted the sprawling redbrick buildings into a jaw-droppingly striking unique and spacious four bedroom, light-filled home, featuring reclaimed timber and exposed brickwork, combined with gleamingly modern stainless steel and concrete.

They went only slightly over their £300,000 budget. Plus, says Alex, they did it all without suffering any great stress and absolutely no disasters. (The only slight hitch was a bat colony which had to be moved, after obtaining a special bat licence, at a cost of £10,000. Ouch!)

It helped that Alex, as director of the family-run Main Company, specialises in designing bespoke upmarket kitchens for homes and restaurants, so he took it all in his stride. And if he did it again, he says, he wouldn’t change a thing.

Aware of how ordering and manufacturing times can cause delays, he made decisions promptly and determined not to keep anyone waiting. He also grabbed the reclaimed timber he wanted quickly, as soon as it arrived at the Main Company from locations throughout America and Europe. The look is bare, stripped-back and industrial. “We kept everything simple in terms of materials, so there wasn’t that much to do,” says Alex, who specialises in combining a rustic look with sleek modern finishes.

As a result, there’s lots of old wood and flaky paint alongside aged zinc and poured concrete: “I love these amazing naturally weathered finishes, a totally unique look you could never recreate yourself," he says.

Combined with clean lines and lots of glazing, the end result is stunning and dramatic. So it’s little wonder this home is in demand as a prime location for advertising and film location shoots, something the couple have just recently signed up to.

They met aged 19, on a gap year in Australia when Emma, who had studied acting, was travelling with best friend Jodie Whittaker, who went on to become the star of Doctor Who and Broadchurch. Still regularly in touch with Jodie, Cheshire-born Emma has no regrets about giving up acting herself, in order, she says, to ‘do the family thing’.

The couple went on to study in Newcastle and work in Manchester, he in advertising design and she in catering, before Alex joined the family business, which his parents founded 40 years ago, and the pair decided to settle back in his home village with a view to starting a family.

Although they originally moved into a Victorian terrace in Kirk Hammerton, the couple were inspired by the city warehouse-style living they had enjoyed in Manchester. “We did have a really cool apartment, it was very like the apartment in Friends, just off Canal Street. It was fun," says Alex.

So when Alex saw ripe-for-conversion Lingfield Barn in nearby Cattal, it was like a dream come true. But there was so much interest in the property, which included stables, woods and six acres of land, they didn’t think they had a chance: “We thought it was out of our league.”

The sealed bidding process included an interview with the sellers, who still live next door. They liked the fact that Alex, 36, and Emma, 37, lived in the next village and wanted to create a family home, so accepted their £489,000 offer.

The couple lived in the stable while the barn, then little more than a shell, underwent an eight-month transformation. Keeping to the layout of the three connected buildings, they created a large room in each with the central two-storey barn housing a huge entrance hall, and the sitting room in the barn to the right. But the area they love most is their huge open plan statement kitchen in the largest barn, where light floods in through large glass bi-fold doors flanked by exposed brickwork pillars. “We spend most of our time here. There’s so much space, the kids enjoy tearing around on their scooters,” laughs Alex.

The 13ft kitchen island, with shiny stainless steel top, has concrete shelving units, made to look as if they came out of a cow barn, at either end. But the couple saved money by getting their builder to craft bespoke finishes on site. So, while moulded concrete kitchen shelves cost around £10,000 each, theirs, made from plywood rendered in concrete, were just a third of the price. Similarly, their under-heated concrete flooring, though polished, has a rough, raw finish, rather than the shiny kind which costs around £400 a square metre. “There’s a lot of cracking going on, like a factory floor, just what we wanted. It adds to the character,” explains Alex, who reckons their kitchen would have retailed at about £60,000.

While shelves have been crafted from vintage teak cheeseboards, reclaimed pine sourced from a mill in Oldham has been attached to engineered timber to create sleek handle-free cabinets. There is also a wood-clad walk-in pantry with gleaming stainless steel doors.

The open-plan dining area, with floor-to-ceiling windows and a long table from a convent, extends into the roof space where a mass of 27 filament bulbs are artfully suspended from the rafters. Their greatest extravagance was a £1,000 projector, which casts their favourite TV programmes and films onto a vast white wall at the end.

Although the layout had to remain within the barn pillars, there are no square, plain rooms upstairs where their daughters – Olivia, eight, Martha, six, and Hazel, two - each have their own dressing rooms.

Bathrooms, one of which looks out through an entire wall of full-height windows on grazing sheep in the field outside, have exposed copper piping and factory-style taps. Reclaimed tiles and marble trough sinks were sourced from Spain, where Emma spent much of her childhood.

Everything from headboards to skirting boards are made from reclaimed wood and even Alex’s grandmother’s port crates have been turned into bedside cabinets.

After two years of enjoying their new home, they’re now about to start work on the garden. “We needed some time off, but now we’re ready,” says Alex, who confesses this project is one of the best things they’ve ever done. “We are going to be here for the rest of our lives.”

*The Main Company, The Green, Green Hammerton, York YO26 8BQ

W: maincompany.com