Home Style: Pull of the Tides

Jackie’s seaside cottage is a calm, cosy and welcoming retreat full of bargain finds and lovingly restored vintage pieces 

Sometimes you choose a property, but quite often they choose you. Who hasn’t experienced that feeling of serendipity when moving to a house that feels exactly right?

Jackie Garrett, who was looking to downsize from a large house, couldn’t resist the lure of a seaside town after years and years of family holidays there. “I could feel the positive energy from the ley line that runs through the area,” she said. 

When she walked through the door of a 350-year-old granite and cob cottage with stunning views over the bay, she knew it was perfect and put in an offer straight away. The cottage had originally been on the market for 18 months, and then became available again when the buyer pulled out. “I say ‘trust, believe and receive,’ and that’s what happened here,” said Jackie. 

After some modernisation work by a local builder, the cottage is light, bright and welcoming, laid out as an upside- down house with an open-plan kitchen, living and dining space upstairs to take advantage of the beautiful views across the sea. 

Many of the original features remain, including the very wide floorboards on the first floor and the coffin hatch beside the dining table. Jackie also recycled as much as she could, using floorboards to make shelving, old wooden lintels for window seats and wall panels for shutters. 

With frames so damp and rotten they had plants growing out of them, all the sash windows had to be replaced, and Jackie took great care choosing uPVC versions that are almost impossible to tell from wooden ones. “I am not a huge fan of uPVC windows in an old property but, being right by the sea, they would have needed to be repainted every five minutes if I replaced them with wooden ones. I believe windows are the souls of the house, so spent a long time making sure I got them right,” she explained. 

The cottage is certainly impressive – a calm and cosy retreat with intriguing touches everywhere, and all done on a minimal budget. Jackie brought some furniture from her old house, and supplemented it with vintage finds from car boots, auctions and charity shops (plus the occasional high-street bargain), often painting pieces of different styles and ages to ensure that they all blended together. 

Jackie’s eye for a good deal includes the reduced- price, ex-showroom wood burner, the bedsteads in the guest bedroom, which cost just a pound each at auction, and the linen cupboard in the boot room, which came from a house clearance. 

Ever ingenious, she made cushions from vintage grain sacks which were a gift from a friend, changed the flexes on high-street pendant lights to give them a more elegant feel and re-enamelled a rusty cast iron bath that the builder had rescued from another job. She fished a pair of linen lampshades out of a skip to combine with inexpensive bases, and even re-purposed wrought iron garden edging to create a decorative shelf bracket that looks very much like something you might find at a flea market in Paris. 

It all works together wonderfully. The aesthetic is a mix of cool Scandinavian style with a disciplined selection of natural colours and textures (Jackie even recovered all her cookery books with old wallpaper because their spines were too bright). 

“There is so much light here and I took huge inspiration from the coastal location, keeping it very pared back,” she said. “I wanted to embrace the whole idea of outdoor living, and I enjoy living around a neutral palette; it’s so relaxing and easy.” 

Photography: Polly Eltes/ living4media

Words: Katherine Sorrell/ living4media