Surrey Homes | SH59 | September 2019 | Education supplement inside

This page: In the airy and bright open-plan living
space Barefloors Ltd sanded layers of thick black
paint off the floors to bring them back to the
original wood
unassuming threshold of Pebble Shore, I sense
that the property’s owners, Robey and Kelly,
greeting us with knowing smiles, are getting
used to a certain reaction from visitors as they
walk in through the tasteful, but modest, front
door and are met with: ‘Oh wow! The sea!
The view!’ Directly in front of us it seems,
a fisherman tends his lobster pots from his
small boat, bobbing gently on the shimmering
water. The uninterrupted elevated view of
shore, sea and sky knocks you for about six
dozen and is hard to look away from.
Nothing can compete – visually, or even
materially with the elemental forces of nature –
something this beachside building found out to its
cost early on; it has had a troubled, but interesting
past. It started life at the end of the 19th century
as a convalescent home for families from London
to retreat to, and by 1899 it became a hotel called
The Grosvenor. Kelly shows me a photograph
of the original hotel building, pointing out the
central section that is now the house. Not long
after The Grosvenor was built there was a