Toni Del Mar, 74, is a musician and music teacher who runs Appalachian Spring B&B from her 300-year-old farmhouse set in the countryside near Totnes.

She had her television debut 16 years ago when she appeared on Channel 4’s Four in a Bed, finishing in second place.

That experience led to an invitation to take part in Channel Five’s The Hotel Inspector, hosted by Alex Polizzi.

Toni, who has ADHD, admits her home had become very cluttered.

Polizzi brought in local decluttering expert Amber Gibbings to help. “After the programme ended, I asked her to come back and I paid her to continue,” Toni explained.

 “We did another room, and amazingly, Alex then rewarded me by allowing me to take eight of my girlfriends to her Hotel Endsleigh for tea.

“That was just so generous and not part of the programme – it was a gift.”

Reflecting on her time as a touring musician, Toni said her vision for the B&B was shaped by the varied standards she encountered in guesthouses.

“When I opened the B&B, I just thought ‘what would be the nicest things that people would like’ – such as the best mattresses, dressing gowns, to have fudge and biscuits to welcome them, to have a teapot because I hate making tea in a cup, hangers that actually can come out of the wardrobe so that you can hang something and put it back in again and that sort of thing,” she said.

Toni had two conservation builders staying over a four-month period, while working on the listed Deer Park wall at Dartington.

They made some interesting discoveries. “We discovered two windows that had been bricked up, and that two of the rooms have got cob walls, which I had no idea about.

”One of them, Dan Segura, decided to move to Totnes and has done all the restoration work on Appalachian Spring for the last 7 years.”

Filming for The Hotel Inspector was a lengthy process.

Toni described the schedule: “They came and did a little bit of filming initially, just so they would have something to show Alex, and for the television company to approve.

“They did a couple of days of filming before she arrived, and then she stayed for a couple of days, including overnight, as seen on the programme, then she left.

“Amber carried on coming, then the filming people came back again, and Alex came back for a second visit, which was just one very long day, to see how it was all going and to go shopping in Totnes.

“Then they did more filming after she'd left and came back yet again because they wanted to show  the transformed room, The Green Room, with the blinds and the curtains installed, as they had not been finished in time for the ‘unveiling’.”

As a self-confessed technophobe, Toni was helped by Mark Annear, owner of the award-winning Cott Inn in Dartington, to optimise her B&B online and to show her how to get started on Booking.com.

Visit Appalachian Spring B&B: https://www.dartingtonbnb.co.uk/

Watch The Hotel Inspector episode: https://tinyurl.com/57wus3y6