Wealden Times | WT181 | March 2017 | Fashion supplement inside

This page: Lupin waits patiently in the hallway for her beach walk
comfortable near the shores of Cape Cod as Camber Sands.
The location has helped, I’m sure; the fact that the beach
is only a pebble skim away must have sent some energising
ozone to aid the inspiration, and help to bring a clear
vision of how the house could be transformed. Nicola, her
husband and three boys live in Burwash Common, but
they know and love Camber Sands: “We’ve always come
down here with the boys. It has such a lovely long sandy
beach. I knew I wanted to find a property down here – the
location is right, it’s near to London and most of the other
beaches nearby are pebbly.” That said, many of us would
have been put off from actually purchasing the house. Nicola
smiles. “It was a tired old chalet bungalow with swirly
carpets, Artex on the ceilings and nicotine stained walls.”
Nice. Fortunately there were no big structural problems,
but it was obvious that she needed to start again from
scratch and that the house had to be completely gutted.
Nicola employed local builder Dave Lancaster and his
team, and the renovation project began in earnest. “My
starting point was a completely white beach house, a New
England look. I didn’t want it to be twee,” she adds, “like
a typical blue and white striped seaside house, but I did
want a rustic feel, with a nod towards the location, and it
definitely had to be a beach house in feel.” The interior was
completely stripped out and then rewired and re-plumbed.
The outside of the building was given a total facelift and clad
in weather boarding, painted in a delicate, pale shade of sea
green. They made a few internal alterations, opening out the
kitchen to make a more spacious, easy living area downstairs.
The inside of the house was then clad in new pine and then
painted white throughout – “we got through an awful lot
of white paint!” she laughs. “The resin from the pine kept
creeping through. We tried brushing it and then rolling.
In the end we sprayed it. That seemed to do the trick and
gave the pure finish that I needed.” All the floorboards on
the ground floor had to be replaced, but upstairs the boards
were intact – preserved by the carpets (it’s good to know that
something beautiful can emerge from beneath the ugliest of
swirly carpets). It was a fairly easy job to paint all the floors a
pale, sea breezy colour: ‘Ammonite’ by Farrow and Ball. The
simple floor treatment has proved to be a godsend too, as it
is very easy to sweep out the main by-product of seaside
105 wealdentimes.co.uk