A CORNISH DREAM
A light-filled early-victorian cottage overlooking St Ives is the perfect showcase for its owners’ charmingly quirky collections
A light-filled Victorian property overlooking St Ives is the perfect showcase for its owners’ quirky collections
with its whitewashed stone walls and semi-tropical garden created over a series of gentle terraces, this small early-victorian cottage, high above St Ives, is most people’s idea of the perfect Cornish hideaway. It’s the type of home that holidaymakers often fantasise about as they gaze into estate agents’ windows but, unlike most of these daydreamers, Sharon Mcswiney and her husband, Tim Ashfield, took the plunge, deciding to change their lives and establish both a home and business here. “We lived in Worcester but used to come down as often as we could,” explains Sharon, who is a metalworker and jeweller. “Each time, we felt more and more drawn to the area – it’s such a beautiful place with a thriving artistic community.” With the Leach Pottery down the road in Higher Stennack and the Tate and Barbara Hepworth galleries in town, there is no lack of inspiration for Sharon, who designs and creates from her studio in the garden. The wrens and long-tailed tits who visit her bird feeder have now been incorporated into her work, along with the leaves, shells and seaweed she forages from local woods and beaches.
Four years ago when the couple first made the decision to up sticks and make a life for themselves in Cornwall, their immediate priority was to find a retail outlet in town to rent for Sharon’s work, which Tim, who had been a kitchen consultant, could run. And they needed to buy a house. In the spring of 2013, they found both and within weeks of selling their Worcester home had moved in. Sharon initially viewed the property with uncertainty: “I’d never envisaged living in a cottage and was used to the space of Victorian houses, but this felt welcoming and cosy and has a sunny, south-facing garden.”
Even the ultra-colourful interior, with its aubergine beams, lilac walls and green radiators, failed to put her off. In
advance of the move, Tim came down with a futon and a coolbox of food, and gallantly camped in the cottage while painting the interior white. So when Sharon arrived some weeks later, with their vast collections of artwork, there was a perfect, blank canvas on which to display them.
No structural work was needed inside the extended cottage, but there were many cosmetic improvements on the couple’s wish list. In the spacious bathroom, which Sharon suspects was converted from a bedroom, the exterior of the rolltop bath was painted an unappealing shade of green, so they transformed it with a coat of grey and gave the varnished, badly scratched floor the same treatment. A ledge behind the bath provides a surface on which to display yet more of her treasured finds.
The kitchen was more problematic. Believed to have been added in the 1970s, its glazed walls and Velux windows flooded the room with light, giving it the feeling of a conservatory. The fittings, however, were poor. “The cupboards didn’t fit, there was very little storage space or worktops and the oven had stopped working,” Sharon remembers, “so we ripped everything out and commissioned a local joiner to make new units. I showed
him cuttings from magazines and suggested he base the design on a grid system, rather like a Mondrian painting.”
The result is a unique combination of open shelves and plywood cupboard doors, some sprayed with Farrow & Ball’s fiery orange Charlotte’s Locks, others painted in Pavilion Gray or Pitch Black. The Swan fridge is also bright orange, the floor is in dark engineered oak boards, the worktop is a matt honed granite and the splashback behind the new cooker was devised by Sharon. She asked a signwriter to create a vinyl panel using a sample of Orla Kiely wallpaper, which is now protected behind toughened glass: “I love the retro look of her designs – we have a lot of her kitchenware, too.” The beauty of the scheme is that it is so flexible. As she points out, “If we want to change the orange, we can just spray the doors of the units and the fridge. So, although the kitchen was a big investment, we felt it was worth it.”
Mid-century-modern design, with its simplicity and clean lines, also has great appeal for Sharon. She discovered several pieces of furniture by Ercol and G Plan, including a daybed and three ‘pebble’ tables, in local antiques shops and has revamped them for the cottage. “This is a small place, so the modest scale of such furniture suits it perfectly,” she explains.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of the cottage’s interior is the amount of artwork, ceramics, sculpture and books on display. Keen to support fellow artists, Sharon has packed every inch of wall and shelf space with their work. “I like to assemble items
into groups and then arrange them by colour, shape or texture,” she explains. “I enjoy creating a still-life out of disparate objects.”
The urge to collect and create extends to her studio, where the shelves are filled with inspirational items for her work: Kilner jars hold seed heads, feathers and fragments of sea glass worn smooth by the waves. By the window lies a sketchpad full of delicate drawings from nature that will be used to inspire her distinctive metalwork and jewellery in silver, copper and brass.
Outside in the garden, striking foliage plants such as echium, eucomis, gunnera and cordyline were chosen by Sharon for the architectural shapes they create . “In Cornwall I’m surrounded by natural beauty,” she says. “Just outside our door is the coastal path, with its wonderful walks, and the beach is minutes away. Moving here has had such an amazing impact on my work and on our lives – more than we could ever have imagined.”
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