Life at the beach

Architect-free building is not for the faint-hearted but Joey Auger and Charlotte Thomson took on a three-year project to create the perfect coastal home.

- Joey Auger and Charlotte Thomson

Few of us can resist the lure of living by the beach - but in Cornwall an affordable coastal address usually comes with a big price tag. The answer? To choose something in need of major restoration - and do most of the work yourself. This is what Joey and Charlotte Thomson did when they bough a dilapidated sea front home facing the Atlantic Ocean in 2015 that hadn’t been lived in for many years.

“It was quite a sad story as the previous owner had passed away while finishing the build,” explains Charlotte “We wanted to do it justice and turn it into the beautiful home that it deserved.”

The house was gutted, added to and transformed to a luxury waterside forever home but with some of the original features of the house incorporated into a thoroughly modern residence.

Set across one floor, the finished house is approximately 300 square metres and has 2 bedrooms, and open plan living space where a two-walled window retracts to create a real sense of interior/exterior living.

The outside now features a modern extension with modern aluminium doors and windows. But the couple kept the classic shape of the building and the original old stone walls are still there. The couple wanted to retain the character of the building, while adding a contemporary twist. A real balancing act. “It would be such a shame to rip everything out and disregard so much history in what is such a prominent part of The Cove,” adds Charlotte.

The stand-out feature is the frameless aluminium bifold doors from Rhino Aluminium. The six doors fold right back, leaving a completely open corner, with no centre column. She admits several structural engineers had told them it couldn’t be done. There were a lot of steel beams involved, up to seven metres long, tapered and angled ones, all going in many different directions, but it did the job and it’s such a wow feature of the property now.