Seconds please!
Be canny when on the hunt for an ideal holiday hideaway, says Fred Redwood
ALL it takes is lighter evenings, a hint of sunshine and Easter lambs scampering about in green pastures — and we start dreaming of second homes. But what makes this annual ritual interesting is that every year brings new second-home hot spots.
In Cornwall, for example, sales are as strong as ever along the north Coast around Padstow, Rock and Polzeath, but this year the west coast is also buzzing.
‘There has been an upsurge of interest in wild, dramatic places like Sennen and Lamorna,’ says Jonathan Cunliffe, of Savills in Truro. ‘It’s partly down to the Poldark effect and partly because better cars and roads mean it’s now quite easy to drive the extra hour to get here.’
Sometimes a holiday hot spot’s popularity puts it beyond most budgets. The bohemian vibe of Brighton still attracts incomers, but with the average price of a flat at £251,025 according to Rightmove, many people search for an alternative.
They have found it in hastings Old Town, where the new cookery school, artisan shops, micro-brewery pubs and the Jerwood Gallery make the East Sussex resort the last word in cool.
That’s even before its pier — restored at a cost of £14 million — opens this summer, offering film festivals and farmers’ markets. Flats cost only £111,275 on average in hastings and you can pick up a three-bedroom terraced home in Old Town for £255,000. a Grade II-listed, four-bedroom period home, packed with beams, boards and an inglenook fireplace, is for sale with Phillips & Stubbs ( 01797 227338, phillipsandstubbs.co.uk) for £465,000. Booming popularity can also mean that a holiday favourite loses its original allure — its peace and quiet.
The Cotswolds used to be unspoilt; then the models, actors and rock stars moved in, closely followed by the bus-trippers, so that nowadays you can hardly move along the pavement in Stow or Burford.
Little wonder that estate agents report that ever more people are heading, instead, to the villages on the edges of the Cotswolds, such as Cherington, Which ford and Long Compton.
‘Prices there are 15 per cent below prime Cotswolds; and from Banbury, you are only an hour by train from London,’ says Tom hayman- Joyce, of hayman-Joyce Estate agent in Moreton-in-Marsh. ‘also, you can let your home for 12 months of the year — visitors love the idea of a country hideaway in winter.’
The Lake District suffers similarly from crowds, hence the popularity of The Eden Valley.
‘We are selling to people, mainly from Yorkshire and Lancashire, who want to get away from it all,’ says amy Mckinlay, at PFK estate agents, Penrith. ‘ It’s beautiful walking country and prices are 20 per cent below the southern Lakes.’
In Pembrokeshire, visitors who were first attracted to the busy beaches of Tenby have now discovered its other qualities — coves and fishing villages that are locals’ favourites. Saundersfoot has great sailing and restaurants, and you can still buy a one-bedroom flat on the seafront for £187,000. On the opposite side of the country, in kent, Deal has captured the imagination of Londoners looking for weekend boltholes.
Easily accessible, they can blow away the cobwebs on the flat promenade and enjoy the town centre conservation area, brimming with Georgian architecture.
In norfolk, Blakeney, with its quay and interesting high Street, is out-performing other villages along the coast this year. Expect to pay £ 350,000 for a small cottage — the price of a four- bedroom house in mid-norfolk.
Bamburgh in northumber- land has also become popular for second-home buyers over the past five years, largely because people from Leeds and harrogate can drive there in a couple of hours.
high prices reflect the area’s desirability — a fourbedroom house will set you back £ 600,000. a threebedroom ‘doer-upper’ of a barn conversion, overlooking Bamburgh Castle, is for sale with Strutt & Parker (01670 512123, struttandparker.
com) for £350,000. This weekend, we will see visitors crowding around the estate agents’ windows in holiday resorts, toying with the notion of joining the 250,000 people who knight Frank estimates own second homes.
Carol Peett, of West Wales Property Finders, offers the following advice for those dipping their toe in the water for the first time.
‘ With staycationing so popular, now is a good time to buy,’ she says. ‘ But before signing anything, visit at different times of the year. Somewhere that’s bustling in the summer may be a ghost town out of season. apart from anything else, that will affect your rental income.’
WHEN NELLA Oortman, the heroine of bestselling novel The Miniaturist, arrives at the Amsterdam townhouse of her wealthy new husband, her eye is caught by his collection of china.
There are plates from China and Dejima — a trading island off the coast of Japan — and the distinctive blue-and-white china of Delft — a Dutch city known for its exquisite porcelain.
In the book, the family are served delicacies — candied fruit, pigeon in ginger sauce, scallops drizzled in mutton broth — from Delftware plates. Their tastes reflect those of Holland’s elite in the 17th century, the period in which the novel is set.
The success of The Miniaturist, which has sold more than 400,000 copies in Britain and is to be turned into a television series by the company which made Tudor drama Wolf Hall for the BBC, has coincided with a revival in the English taste for Delft-style tiles in bathroom and kitchen design.
Fired Earth ( firedearth.com), for example, has a collection of bird designs — woodpeckers, egrets, herons and songbirds (£20.95 each) — or miniature Dutch landscape scenes. One shows a view of a pottery workshop with a smoking kiln chimney (£21.95 each).
The price, and the delicacy of the drawings, prohibit tiling an entire room. Traditionally, tiles with images were used as eye-catchers in a scheme of plain Delft white tiles (£2.80, also from Fired Earth) or tiles with floral borders (£6.95).
These tiles are based on the wares produced in the city of Delft and other Dutch centres such as Haarlem, Amsterdam and Rotterdam from around 1580.
Merchants from the Dutch East India Company had begun to import blue-and-white porcelain from China, sparking a fashion for these colours. Dutch potteries started creating similar designs on bowls, plates and tiles.
The latter proved exceptionally popular when the Dutch realised the tiles were waterproof when set in cement. In a low-lying country prone to flooding, a basement kitchen covered in water-resistant tiles was a novel solution to an age-old problem.
In Johannes Vermeer’s painting The Milkmaid, in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, a single tier of Delft tiles is in place of a wooden skirting board in a scullery.
The finest tiles, with the most carefully painted imagery, were used in rooms on the upper storeys. In Pieter de Hooch’s oil painting Woman Peeling Apples, which can be seen at the Wallace Collection in London, delicate Delft tiles are set inside a magnificent fireplace.
The characteristic Delft tile is blue and white, with a vignette set in a roundel.
These scenes from everyday life included sea and landscapes, birds, courting lovers, coats of arms and flowers. Tulips — at the height of the famous ‘tulip-mania’, when Dutch merchants bet their fortunes on a single bulb — were particularly popular. Curiously, there are few windmills on genuine antique Delft tiles, though they are a stock image on modern replicas.
Tile specialist Walls and Floors ( wallsandfloors.co.uk), for example, has a range of Delft- style tiles (£11.95 for four) depicting Dutch windmills, garden flowers, and harbour views reminiscent of the great sailing scenes of the Dutch master Willem van de Velde the Younger, whose paintings can also be seen at the Wallace Collection.
Artists at the Douglas Watson Studio in Henley- on-Thames ( douglaswatsonstudio.co.uk) have made Delft tiles for a fireplace and lodge kitchen at Highclere Castle in Hampshire, the stately home where Downton Abbey is filmed, and for Burgh Hall in Lithlingow, birthplace of Mary Queen of Scots.
JANET Watson, a partner at the studio, explains that the commission at Burgh Hall had to reflect the history of the town from its foundation to the present day. Modern images of skateboarders and golfers sit alongside more traditional trades and pursuits.
Janet and Douglas recently travelled to Amsterdam to visit the Rembrandt House Museum, where they were struck by the use of ‘mixed white’ Delft tiles, in different shades of cream and chalk. It is an effect they plan to replicate. The Douglas Watson tiles are as delicately drawn as historic originals.
For something more bold, robust and modern, Reptile Tiles in Carmarthenshire has taken the traditional Delft format of a picture inside a decorated roundel and given it a graphic treatment. Its British Wildlife tiles have an almost cartoonish innocence.
There are 20 designs to chose from including a mole, fox, squirrel, crayfish, woodpecker, badger and four different owls. They would be a delight in the kitchen. For keen bird- spotters, there is a separate series of wrens, nuthatches, firecrests, siskins and waxwings.
If you hanker after an original, they do come up at auction — but for a price.
Last year, at Bonham’s auction house, a single, 17th-century, blueand-white Delft tile sold for £350. The subject? A rather risqué scene of a sea-god carrying a beautiful nymph into a Delft-blue sea.