Character building

How do you make a newly built space look like an old one? The transformation of a house on the Cornish coast, by HÁM interiors, may provide the answer, believes Arabella Youens

- Arabella Youens

SITUATED in one of north Cornwall's most desirable locations between the restaurants of Padstow and the watersports of Harlyn-Atlanta in Trevone has been in Jess Alken-Theasby's family for generations. Two beaches, one sandy, the other rocky, lie seconds from the house, which was built on a clifftop in 1899. Mrs. AlkenTheasby's great-grandfather was the artist J. H. C. Millar, a favourite of George V, who painted the views that can be enjoyed from almost all aspects of the Victorian main house and a further four apartments. The exception is this building,' explains Mrs Alken-Theasby.

'It only has a glimpse of the sea, so we knew we had to do something different with the interiors.' When her great-uncle bought the guest house in the 1950s, the building was used as a shelter for boats and for mending crabbing nets. With her husband, Ash, she set out to bring it back to life. Today, thanks to the work of brother-and-sister interior designers Kate and Tom Cox, of HÁM Interiors in Henleyon-Thames, Oxfordshire, it has been has been bought back to life as the Net Loft. The family now regard it as Atlanta's 'eccentric relative'.

With two bedrooms, a large living room, an outdoor dining terrace, and cinema room (ideal for those all-too-predictable wet Cornish days), the revamped former outbuilding sleeps four.

HÁM Interiors was known to the couple long before the project to overhaul all the guest rooms at Atlanta began. 'We'd followed other projects and been a regular customer at Studio HÁM, its retail offshoot,' says Mrs AlkenTheasby. 'Then we decided to see what the company could do when given what was, essence, a blank canvas, such as the Net Loft.' The first thing to do when approaching a new building that has little or no existing