Gran designs BESIDE THE SEA
A pebble’s throw from the beach, this 20th-century bungalow combines granny chic and retro style with the shades and textures of the coast
The oyster beds and Turner views of the north Kent coast have long attracted artists and designers. Freelance stylist Carl Braganza has carved out a piece of it for himself at Seasalter, just west of Whitstable. Carl, who started his working life on Country Living and spent four years crafting and creating images for the magazine’s homes pages, has known the area most of his life, first from family trips to Whitstable as a child and later from Country Living location shoots and weekend art courses, painting the view. He’d always loved the sense of stepping back in time – the perfectly maintained semi-rural peace, the silence broken only by birdsong and the sound of the sea. And then he heard about a 1970s bungalow for sale.
“Our first visit was on a March day, with daffodils out everywhere, and forsythia and camellia buds already showing in the front garden,” Carl says. The layout was wrong, he recalls, but the ceilings were much higher than usual for a bungalow, the light was gorgeous and the view was exactly the one he’d painted: “I’d redesigned it in my head within ten minutes and bought it in 48 hours.” Seeing past the patterned carpets and avocado bathroom suite that had provided a perfect retirement home for the previous owner until her nineties, Carl had a vision for somewhere combining the simplicity of a 1930s schoolhouse with the handcrafted comforts of traditional country living. His mental moodboard included parquet flooring and neat panelled walls, along with floral fabrics, patchwork and eiderdowns, vintage ceramics and embroidered linens.
Nine years later, the result is classic country cottage (“I embraced granny chic”) with a retro edge, a bit of modernism among the prettiness, and all clad in the muted, misty colours of the beach. The refiguring of the layout was done with minimal disruption by knocking the two back bedrooms into one big living-dining area, with doors opening onto the south-west-facing garden at one end and a little kitchen hooked around a corner at the other, creating an L shape. That open-plan flow – and the schoolhouse style – are both reinforced by the parquet floor throughout, formerly an original ballroom floor from the officers’ mess at a wartime airfield in Cambridgeshire.
“This involved boxing up shedfulls of Canadian maple tiles and couriering them back to Kent,” Carl remembers. The floor is laid to his own design, in herringbone pattern with a double-tile border that tracks the floor outline from one room to another. This is matched by plain painted panelling up to eye level – concealing the new copper heating pipes and topped by a ledge that provides a shelf for pictures and display items in the living areas as well as ceramics and cooking ingredients in the kitchen.
Horizontal coat pegs in the bedrooms (now at the front of the house) add hanging storage in classic school cloakroom style: you can just imagine the satchels and
“An amazing mix of shell colours and textures is washed up on the shore”
gym bags. To make things look as though they’d always been there, Carl scoured boot sales and ebay for pre-loved items with that reassuring sense of having already lasted 40 years or more. Old enamel baking trays, sieves, palette knives and nutmeg graters for the kitchen; enamel fittings and porcelain switches for the lights. The floral curtains from the original sitting room were relined and hung in the second bedroom, where the high wooden bedframe has an old-fashioned dormitory feel, while in the main bedroom Carl has made curtains from French woollen blankets.
Modernist touches such as an Anglepoise lamp accentuate the traditional, homely feel rather than fighting with it (although Granny might not have approved of the exposed overhead lightbulbs, left unshaded for a bit of 21st-century industrial style). And a few modern florals find their place in perfect comfort, too: the splashy Vivienne Westwood wallpaper (used on the wall behind the dining table) and the GP&J Baker poppy print of the sofa (“I saved for ten years for that!”) are a clever match for the vintage fabric of the standard lampshade.
Years of Country Living shoots have given Carl a love of traditional kitchen staples such as walk-in pantries and china-stacked dressers, keeping everything on display and close at hand. The big glass-fronted cabinet between the sitting and dining areas is his space-saving nod to this, holding everything from china to linens: “It’s only mismatched plates and old cutlery, but I love taking the time to set the table properly, with napkins and flowers.”
Carl has done his share of restoring and repurposing furniture over the years, but here pieces were chosen because they fitted the house just as they were. The vintage wardrobe and bow-fronted chest in the main bedroom were already painted as if they belonged, blending into the Little Greene shades of the walls, which reflect the local limestone, sand and oyster shells. The only exception to this palette is the bathroom, where Farrow & Ball’s London Clay adds a richer, warmer colour. But even here, the tiles were inspired by the oyster beds that are exposed at low tide and the shells Carl collects on his walks. “An amazing mix of colours and textures are washed up on the shore: blues and lilacs, some sharp and frilly, some smooth and polished,” he says.
The Moroccan handmade tiles are one of the few things he spent money on, mirroring the pattern of the parquet floor with a sweep of iridescent bricks around and beneath the bath. The bath itself – £30 on ebay and twice that to transport from Lancashire – has since been re-enamelled, but the exterior left discoloured and patinaed: “That’s what I fell in love with – it reminds me of rusted groynes on the beach.”
The sea is always there, that 180° Turner view from the Thames Estuary to Whitstable Harbour. Open the back door and you can smell it – and hear it, crashing onto the pebble beach. But inside this neatly remodelled house, all is as safe and peaceful as Granny could have wanted.