Sea change
An outdated home in Sussex has been given a cool contemporary look with coastal-inspired wooden boarding and sleek concrete floors
Coastalinspired wooden boarding updates a Sussex home
Searching for a house on the Sussex coast to put a contemporary stamp on, Vanessa De Angelis realised that she’d need to make a choice between having lots of space and a sea-view location. ‘We liked the Chichester, Witterings and Selsey area, but it became clear that anywhere on the seafront itself attracted a real premium. There were hardly any houses for sale of a size we needed, as we wanted a spare bedroom for guests,’ says Vanessa, 41, a lawyer, who lives with husband, Chris, 43, also a lawyer, and children Oriana, 10, and Marcus, seven. ‘Any affordable properties were usually wrecks, which a builder was about to snap up.’
Then they stumbled across a four-bedroom detached 1960s house in the village of West Wittering. It was a few roads back from the seafront, but had lots of potential. ‘It had been lived in by an elderly couple and required total renovation, but that was fine because we were open to that. Most importantly, it was light and spacious and just a few minutes’ walk from the sea,’ Vanessa explains.
Realising they wouldn’t need to change the basic shape of the house or extend, they set about remodelling the property over the course of a year, completely changing the layout downstairs. ‘We love big, open-plan spaces rather than small rooms, so we employed a builder who knocked down most of the interior walls to make one huge area with living, dining and relaxing zones,’ says Vanessa.
The other major step was to convert the garage into the kitchen, an easy decision as there was plenty of off-street parking. ‘It means that the kitchen is slightly round the corner from the rest of the space and can’t be seen from the living room. That works for us as we didn’t want cooking smells and the sight of food preparation in front of us all the time.’
A large downstairs cloakroom is handily placed for getting rid of sand from the beach and storing belongings from surfboards to coolbags. Upstairs the only structural change the couple made was to add an ensuite to the main bedroom by taking a slice off the room and also adding in an airing cupboard.
Updating the tired exterior of the house was also on the couple’s to-do list. ‘You have to be very careful with coastal properties and we opted for a weatherboard cladding that’s actually made from fibre CONTINUED OVER PAGE
‘I’m a grey freak so it was obvious to me that everything should be in shades of grey,’ SAYS VANESSA
cement, so it’s a great alternative to traditional timber,’ says Vanessa. ‘It doesn’t rot and has the advantage of being low maintenance. We also replaced the doors and windows. I’m a grey freak, so everything had to be in shades of grey.’
Inside, Vanessa had an equally strong vision. ‘I’d already decided that the downstairs would have darker grey floors and lighter walls, and upstairs would have lighter floors and darker grey walls. I had distressed wooden boarding in mind for the walls of the ground floor but it was a real problem finding exactly what I was looking for.’ Many of the recycled products were too full of nails and old paint, and brandnew boards were too uniform, so she was delighted to find a company called Surface Story that makes distressed wood boarding. ‘In fact, I went wild, putting it all along one wall and in the kitchen as well as using it for shelving!’ she says.
Laying concrete flooring was a lot easier. ‘I’d used a system in a previous house where you put down a base and then only have a thin layer, between three and six millimetres, of the concrete on top. It’s not like a poured concrete floor, which is a major operation and takes a long time to set – this is a lot simpler, and also available through the same company,’ Vanessa explains. As well as grey concrete floors downstairs and in the bathrooms, she has opted for concrete worktops. ‘It’s a very hardwearing material and I like that slightly industrial look. We just bought a basic white kitchen and made it look like something a bit more special with them.
‘Very early on we factored in underfloor heating wherever we could, and although there are heated towel rails in the bathrooms, I had them specially sprayed grey so they would blend in.’ Simple blinds from Tuiss in a grey blackout fabric sit at the windows. ‘I wanted them to be the same throughout the whole house – and the plainer the better,’ says Vanessa. ‘I’m happy with tones of grey in all the rooms, with just the odd touch of colour here and there.’
The couple feel that the £150,000 they’ve spent on the renovation, on top of the £550,000 purchase price, was worth every penny and the family really appreciates its sunny seaside home. Even Vanessa feels that compromising on location was the right thing to do. ‘I love the house and now genuinely prefer being within easy reach of the sea rather than right on it,’ she says.
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