The bag designer Liz Cox prides herself on her ability to match the right accessories to a customer on first sight. "I'm like Juliette Binoche's character in the film Chocolat," says Cox, who creates everything from leather totes to clutches, wallets to baguettes, satchels to giraffe-motif travel cases, "except I pick out the kind of bag I know people will love, and what will suit them, instead of candy. I love to find out exactly what works with who and what. It's the same approach I brought to my house."
Cox, 45 - who has worked for Aquascutum and consults for Mulberry, and whose own-brand goods, sold in her two shops in the centre of Bath, are sported by Judi Dench and Geri Halliwell - runs a £2m business. The chief secret of her success, she says, is the level of craftsmanship and attention paid to every item in her Somerset workshop; qualities that were also key to the restoration of her six-bedroom Regency villa. It was a process she describes - characteristically, using bag-speak - as "working backwards and unpicking the threads of evidence, with a lot of detective work".
Today, Forefield House is one of Bath's finest, and most authentic, Georgian homes. Dating from 1817, the four-storey villa stands on Lyncombe Hill, a quiet residential street with a row of grand houses, built as the approach to early-19th-century pleas-ure gardens just behind. It has an immaculate Bath-stone facade, original sash windows and a frenzy of wrought-iron steps, gates and railings to back and front. Inside, everything from Greek-revival cornices to an 1815 door knocker (its design celebrating Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo) and original bedroom-door hooks work together to create a microcosm of the Georgian domestic world.
"I've always loved the period," Cox says. "It's all about lightness and brightness, and huge windows. So, when we saw the house, I knew we had to have it."
In 1997, Cox and her copywriter husband, Andrew Cater, 49, left west London for Bath to pursue Cox's business ventures - she grew up in the West Country and was keen to staff her Somerset workshops with a hand-picked team - and to create a family home. (They now have two daughters, Connie, 12, and Maddie, 8.) Forefield House, with more than 4,000 sq ft of interior space, huge vaults on the lower ground floor, a two-storey coach house, a glasshouse and uninterrupted views over the Bath skyline, was perfect - not least because it was ready for what Cox likes to call a "reinstatement", rather than a renovation project.
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Although structurally sound, the house, which they bought for about £500,000, was "in a very sorry state", she says. It had been turned into four self-contained flats in the 1970s. Thick pipes had been forced through the delicate cornicing, the olive-green and brown-papered walls were covered with electrical wiring and most of the 16 fireplaces were boarded up. Pennant slab floors were concealed by concrete, and delicate acanthus-leaf mouldings encrusted in generations of paint.
The couple assembled a team of local craftsmen and set about uncovering the cornicing, having the coal-blackened exterior of the house cleaned (Cater researched an especially gentle method, also used for St Paul's Cathedral) and reconstructing the missing lead-starred balconettes for the windows.
As for the cost, the pair preferred to stay in denial. "Reinstating the original features and layout of a 200-year-old Grade II-listed building is not a project you can realistically budget for," Cox says. "We avoided tallies and reckonings for fear of knowing the real costs - but mainly because we didn't want to be deterred from our focus on returning the house to its grand origins."
The biggest job was returning the lower-ground floor to its original layout of vaults, scullery, stores and housekeeper's rooms (now with a kitchen/breakfast room and snug) - 14 skiploads of concrete screed were removed to lay the original flooring bare.
"During the work, the house revealed things to us," Cox recalls. "We went to paint the hallway in Farrow & Ball Blue Gray, and I uncovered an original fragment of wall in almost exactly the same colour. It was quite spooky."
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Like any self-respecting Georgian re-creationist, she continued with the paint firm's colours for the two main reception rooms, on the ground floor, and for the bedrooms, over the first and second floors - though she balked at the John Soane custard yellow so popular in the period. Fowler Pink decorates the kitchen, with its four-oven Aga; the bathrooms are done in Chappell Green.
There are old chandeliers and slightly shabby mirrors, found at markets in Bordeaux, but contemporary impasto nudes. Antique furniture is covered with Cox's own fabrics, emblazoned with daisies, sunflowers and Scottie dogs, adding a note of modernity.
Much of the furniture, however, has now been packed away. Cox is selling up to spend more time in Italy, where her tanneries are, and where the family rents a farmhouse near Siena.
They'll be leaving a couple of jobs for Forefield's next owners. The coach house and Victorian glasshouse are still in need of "reinstatement" - although, unsurprisingly, Cox has already done most of the research.
Forefield House is for sale for £2.5m with Knight Frank (01225 325999) and Savills (01225 474550);primelocation.com