Wealden Times | WT186 | August 2017 | Wedding supplement inside

Above: In one corner, Helen has uncovered part of the cottage’s
sandstone walls, something she has also done in the courtyard –
stripping back render to the bare rock
open a clothes shop. “By then Hastings Old Town already
had stupid shop rents,” she says. “When a large corner space
came up – it used to be occupied by Eras of Style antiques,
now in Bexhill – we saw the potential and pounced.
“We took that over and I bought a very large apartment
in a big house further inland in St Leonards. It was an
amazing place – the whole ground floor – but it was
too far out. I’m a city girl. I like the noise of a town and
people passing. There were no shops, no community.
“I put it on the market and it sold immediately and I
hadn’t even thought where I was going to move to. Then
early one morning, I saw this house in Norman Road
online. I’d seen it before and I knew it was right for me.”
The house is in a row of exquisite workers’ cottages
built in the 1830s by Decimus Burton, the great Georgian
architect who designed Wellington Arch, Regent’s
Park Inner Circle, as well as the splendid buildings in
this part of town, known as Burton St Leonards.
“The cottages were built for workers to live in while
they constructed all the big houses. I knew it was perfect
for me, because I love living above the shop – and this
house is as close to living above SHOP as I could find.”
But while the location and bones of the house were ideal,
everything else about it was dark and ugly. “When I bought it
everything was yellow and dark brown – even the window
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