When Christian Magg and his husband Greg Taylor stumbled upon the picture-postcard village of Chilham in Kent they knew it was where they wanted to live.

Christian, from Germany, and Greg, from America, had fallen in love with England shortly after falling in love with each other. 

In the village, so pretty it has been used as a backdrop for film and TV adaptations from Jane Austen to Miss Marple, they snapped up a timber-framed cottage dating  from 1549 and set out to give it the most lavish and meticulous restoration money could buy.

The garden would be designed by a Chelsea gold medal winner, every single brick would be removed, repaired and 'kissed' before repointing and an artisan craftsman would use medieval glass in the windows. 

The problem – and it was a problem that almost broke them – was the person they chose to carry out the vast project. Local builder James Fuller turned out to be not just an unreliable workman but a crazed thug who would terrorise the couple for months. 

The purchase price was £600,000 when they bought the Grade-II listed Tudor property in 2019 but the budget for their planned extraordinary upgrade would be some three times as much.

Their super-sensitive restoration would see them almost double the floor-plan by building a basement and modern glass extension and ripping out the attic space to give the two upstairs bedrooms higher ceilings.

Every brick on the upstairs exterior walls was to be removed, repointed and re-rendered while centuries-old internal walls, made of wattle and daub, would be stripped and repaired and then replastered in lime.

The couple, who met at Munich's famous Oktoberfest 14 years ago, even planned a wet room with a mosaic floor copied from one in the Vatican and a high-tech Japanese toilet in the guest room.

There would be a dedicated storage area just to accommodate their Christmas decorations, as Christian believes 'you can never have enough storage'.

However, the renovation, which would not have been out of place on TV's Grand Designs, would turn a dream home project into a nightmare – because of Fuller.

Christian, 52, from Augsburg, and 63-year-old city financier Greg from Colorado, had initially known Fuller as a near neighbour, as he briefly lived opposite them, across the pretty square.

And when they learned that he did general building work – at the time when they were still drawing up their bigger plans for the house – they decided to give him a trial run with a smaller project: the renovation of the stand-alone garage, which sits some 50 yards behind the main property.

Fuller, 44, who now lives in nearby Ashford, may have been on his best behaviour, knowing how much potential work was at stake, because he carried out the garage job to an acceptable standard and broadly on time.

This persuaded them to make what would be the terrible mistake of offering him the big job on the house.

A source close to the couple said: 'This was their Hansel and Gretel cottage, an archetypal historic English country home on a chocolate-box village square opposite a 15th century pub and 14th century church. What more could they want?

'But it was quite small, cold and dark and needed a lot of TLC so the plan was to make it warmer and fill it with light and have more living space.

'They wanted to keep the building work as local as possible and they had begun to trust Fuller. Looking back though that was a terrible mistake.

'It was clearly a much bigger, more complex project than the garage and they didn't really do their due diligence, they never really looked into him all that much.'

Their project included three dilapidated outbuildings behind the house, once used to store bins, firewood and debris, being replaced by a glass structure held together by black metal frames that linked to the main house and formed part of a new modern kitchen, dining space and home office.

The basement – the only way to gain a third bedroom – would be dug under a rear courtyard and be shored up with steel and supervised by an archaeologist for six months due to the fact that it abuts Chilham Castle's old lopsided boundary wall.

The blueprints would increase the floor-plan from 1,311 sq ft to 2,279 sq ft and would see the 20th-century pine floors replaced with engineered wood so that underfloor heating and insulation could be installed.

Meanwhile, Christian and Greg hired celebrated horticultural expert Jo Thompson to design a fairytale garden, with a stream flowing from the old well.

Fuller started work early in 2021, initially restoring the roof tiles, before rendering the outside of the house and completing the concrete and steel structure of the basement.

But that was as far as he would get as relations soon began to sour – and they began to get glimpses of Fuller's toxic and explosive personality.

The source explained: 'Fuller was on the project for about two years and although work started well initially, it pretty much became stagnant.

'He wasn't very well organised. He routinely failed to order building materials on time which meant that contractors were often left sitting in their cars waiting around then being unable to do any work.

'One of the contractors working on the garden told them that he felt intimidated by James. He was very verbally aggressive during the delivery of some wildflower turf.

'Then the architects started to have serious misgivings about Fuller because he failed to turn up to meetings with them. In the end they actually told Christian and Greg point-blank, "We don't think you can finish this project with him in charge".'

By this point, after two years, Fuller had been paid an incredible £1.4million – but a lot of the work paid for hadn't been carried out.

Yet he was still demanding more and more cash.

In October 2023, soon after being fired, Fuller submitted yet another bill for £160,000, claiming he had to pay four contractors who had been working with him every day.

The source said: 'They knew he was just trying it on as they'd seen the site every day and there had been no one working there.

'So they hired a surveyor to check over his work – and they estimated it only being worth around £500,000. Not the £1.4million he'd already been paid.

'And even things that he had done were going to need to be redone – rendering on the walls had started to come down, stuff like that. They refused to pay another penny.'

But soon they found that they were the subject of a terrifying two-year campaign of harassment and intimidation against them.

The couple had a death threat posted through their letter box and homophobic graffiti with a vile sex slur about the couple was written on their garage door.

An old abandoned car was dumped on land close to their house spraypainted with their names and the words 'pay up'.

On one occasion when the couple were taking part in a woodland Easter egg hunt for children in the village Fuller turned up and began screaming that he would beat Greg up in front of their friends and neighbours.

Fuller once tried to forcibly grab their dog, Mable – they think as a kidnap attempt.

On another occasion an anonymous letter was posted through their front door which read: 'U need to pay. U need to pay now. We f***ing mean it. If u don't, ya necks gonna get snapped. If u ring the police, I swear to God we will kill that dog. Don't walk out ya house until u have it all payed [sic].'

When the couple were helping to run a community bar in the village square, Fuller again turned up to confront them menacingly. This ended with him screaming 'liars' and then reversing his van into their Range Rover, breaking the bumper and headlights.

Security cameras captured Fuller smashing expensive lead-lined side windows of the house at one o'clock in the morning with a hammer.

Shocking footage obtained by the Daily Mail shows how raging Fuller's campaign culminated in him climbing onto the roof of the cottage and destroying it tile by precious historic tile, hurling them to the ground to smash.

Fuller was only finally arrested after climbing down.

He eventually pleaded guilty to harassment without violence and two counts of causing criminal damage worth £20,000-30,000.

Fuller had been due to be sentenced last month but the victims had been in liaison with the police and CPS to point out the damage he had caused had been much, much higher than the indictment stated – in fact it was put at £164,000.

This saw the case adjourned and sentencing instead transferred to Canterbury Crown Court for a date to be arranged.

Fuller is on bail but not allowed to enter the village of Chilham nor to have any contact with Christian or Greg.

The couple painstakingly picked over the remains of their roof to salvage as many of the original tiles as possible but many have had to be replaced.

But happily their rebuild is nearly complete after five long years, though they still need to have panes of glass on the extension replaced after they were scratched by some of the roof tiles thrown down.

The couple showed off the spectacular results of their project in a feature with The Times in May, during which they posed for the pictures seen here.

Greg said then: 'Every brick was taken out, kissed, loved, sent to college and put back.

'For what we spent we could have had a manor house. But we were so in love with this village, we didn't want to live in a house with a long drive behind gates.'

The article didn't mention Fuller.

But Greg did allude to a happy ending: 'It's safe to say we spent three times what we paid for the cottage on the remodel. I doubt we could sell it for that, but this is our forever home, so we said, "let's get what we want". And living here is such a joy.'

The Daily Mail approached Christian and Greg but they declined to discuss the case.

But our source concluded: 'Fuller made their lives a misery. He saw them as a cash cow and then went crazy when they stopped paying him.

'He was driving around in a brand new BMW and a white Range Rover as well as buying a new work van. He also took his whole family on the holiday of a lifetime to America.

'But they never owed him a penny. In reality it was he who bled them dry.'