Drawn to THE SEA

It was a love of the Cornish coast that drew Paul Massey to his harbourside home, and an extraordinary coincidence sealed the deal

FEATURE CHARLOTTE PACKER PHOTOGRAPHS PAUL MASSEY

As tales of house hunting go, Paul Massey’s is hard to beat. A photographer by profession and an inveterate traveller, he was coming to the end of a three-year sojourn in Sri Lanka when he received details of an old fisherman’s cottage in Cornwall. ‘I’d been looking in the area for years without much success,’ he explains, ‘and I assumed it would be gone by the time I got back.’

But as luck would have it, the cottage was still on the market when he returned. ‘I literally dropped my luggage at home and set o to see the house,’ he recalls. On route to view the cottage, Paul received a random email from his mother, who had no idea he was on his way to Cornwall. ‘She’d never done it before, and has never done it since,’ he laughs, ‘but a friend was teaching her how to upload images and she was practising with an old photo of me, aged about nine. I was holding a mackerel and behind me I could see my dad leaning against the house I was about to view.’

Needless to say, the purchase felt as though it was meant to be, and within a couple of months of that fateful viewing, Paul had moved into the 600-year- old building. ‘It was habitable,’ he says. ‘By no means a wreck; but all the good stu was hidden behind false walls and ceilings put up by the previous owners.’

The renovation was straightforward, mostly a matter of stripping out the modern additions and replacing them with fixtures and fittings that were sympathetic to the age and simplicity of the architecture. Work began even as the removal van was being unloaded, Paul says. ‘A couple of guys popped in to say hello and to o er their help if I needed anything doing, and before I TOP Paul found the trunk in a London skip and gave it a new lease of life with a coat of white paint. The glass jar lled with shells came back from Sri Lanka with him ABOVE Paul’s cottage looks out across Mousehole harbour FACING PAGE Paul chose a soft, neutral grey (‘ Tom’s Bakery’ by Earthborn) for the walls throughout the house. It is a clay- based paint which Paul recommends for use on granite buildings as it allows the walls to breathe. The armchair came from an antiques shop in Sussex; the cushion cover, and those in the window seat, are made from old linens that Paul picked up from markets in France and Sri Lanka. The mirror and metal table came from a French brocante and the tripod lamp came from Two Columbia Road, London