Surrey Homes | SH29 | March 2017 | Fashion supplement inside

Left: Nicola wanted each room in the house to feature one wall clad in reclaimed floorboards. Right: Lupin waits patiently in the
hallway for her beach walk
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
living – sand, which is inevitably traipsed in all the time.
Nicola’s eye for detail and her clever use of up-cycled
salvage and retro items has come into its own on this project.
Although the pine cladding is completely white, she wanted
one wall in each room – “I don’t like the term ‘feature wall’,
but there isn’t another word for it” – to be clad in old salvaged
floorboards that Nicola has carefully collected. The result is
very effective, “although there is one room in the house that
has missed out because the builders couldn’t quite get their
heads around the fact that I wanted to use old floorboards on
the walls”. They weren’t sure about the scaffolding planks that
Nicola has used on the kitchen units either, but they, and the
bespoke handles, really give the right rustic feel to the kitchen.
The vintage, slightly rustic look has been very successfully
applied in this house and I wonder how Nicola has managed
to find so many perfectly appropriate items in such a
77 wealdentimes.co.uk