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ICHAEL Caines has a smudge of what looks like red wine sauce on his chef whites, but Lympstone Manor is his baby – he can wear as much sauce as he wants.

Perched on the edge of Devon’s Exe estuary, on the boundary between Exmouth and Lympstone village, the Georgian manor house – as milky and square as a lump of nougat, with alabaster gravel pathways fringed with lavender – “was a house deeply in need of me”, says the 48-year-old chef.

Early in his career, Michael was championed by Raymond Blanc and became head chef at Gidleigh Park, Devon, where he went on to hold two Michelin stars for 18 consecutive years, before leaving at the beginning of 2016 to renovate Lympstone. “We found each other at the right time,” he says, referring to his new venture.

Between sips of double espresso in the plush book-lined foyer, which has ladders worthy of Beauty And The Beast, he explains that, on first encountering the house, then called Courtlands, it was “pretty run down”, and the grounds overgrown.

“It needed to be rescued,” the Exeter-born chef remembers, although one thing didn’t need help: “Straightaway, that view was just phenomenal.”

The lawn slopes down to a ridge, where the trees are silhouetted against the smooth, shifting water of the Exe – and then there’s just sky. A huge wide-open wedge of it, seemingly doubled by its reflection in the estuary, where the odd boat bobs restlessly, and the tide slips and slides on the sand.

Every aspect of the former private house, built in the late 1700s (and lived in by the Baring banking family – whose descendants include Diana, Princess of Wales), is geared towards that view, from the terrace to the crest of the driveway.

Here, a string of free-touse burgundy ‘sit-up and beg’ bikes hang around like a gaggle of teens, waiting to be