A contemporary family home with sweeping views of the Cornish sea

On a pearly, still dawn, when an aquamarine sea merges with the sky and miles of wet sand glitter, the view from this Cornish house is breathtaking – and in a tempest, it is terrific. This vista was all-important when the owners commissioned the team from the interiors studio Th2designs to make the house, which was designed by architects McLean Quinlan, work for their large family, as well as for the numerous friends and relations eager to fill its many bedrooms.

Gail Taylor, the founder of Th2designs, chose a palette of blue, sand and driftwood shades for the decoration. More significantly, she and Charlotte Mackenzie, who was senior designer on the project, were very careful not to detract from the panoramic sweep outside, dressing most of the windows with Roman blinds in discreet fabrics and only adding the occasional pair of plain curtains in a bedroom.

The house is built into the hillside and the main entrance at the top of the house opens to reveal an instant vista of the sea through a window in the wall opposite the front door. A corridor leads off from the hallway to the bedrooms on this floor, the wooden floorboards softened with runners. There is another entrance on the sea-facing side of the house, where a sturdy oak door opens to a path that winds past the pool – through the garden, bright with drifts of agapanthus – and leads directly to the beach. This back entrance has a bench long enough for a whole gang of swimmers or surfers to sit and shake off the sand, and there is a boot room nearby to stow flip-flops and towels. A sturdy rug on the slate floor can stand up to all the coming and going.

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‘None of the finishes is precious. This house has to stand up to sandy feet and be a place where you can put your feet up on the sofas,’ says Gail. The sofas in question, Flexform’s sectional ‘Groundpiece’ design, are in the main sitting room on the upper floor. ‘It’s the owners’ favourite sofa – we’ve used it in previous projects with them,’ explains Charlotte. Facing the sofas at one end of this long, bright room is a pair of ‘Santa Monica’ armchairs from Poliform, which can swivel round as the action moves to the dining area – in the centre of the room – or to the kitchen, with its polished concrete worktop, at the far end. The Th2designs team has reprised the polished concrete look in a tubby scagliola coffee table, which sits beside the owners’ existing wooden one between the sofas.

The family lived in the house for a couple of years before calling in the interior designers, so they knew exactly what worked for them and what did not. ‘The owners wanted us to make it more comfortable. It was a beautiful statement house,’ says Gail. ‘But it wasn’t homely.’ In the sitting room, a stone wall around the fireplace felt too cold, so it was plastered over and painted a warm white to soften the space and reflect the sky. A pair of wall lights was added, too, which now cast a warm golden glow in the evening.

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Through a door behind the sofa on the seaward side is the snug, with a wall of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and a large television. Here, the modular sofa, also by Flexform, and a pair of huge wooden tables allow for lots of relaxed, feet-up lounging. The designers took the colours for this room from a large painting of a swimming pool that hangs above the sofa. The silk carpet, woven specially for the space by Tai Ping,
graduates from subtle sand-like tones at its centre to midnight blue at the edges. The designers felt that the carpet that was previously in this room, which had a pattern of watery ripples, would be better suited to a different space. After having it cut down, they have reused it to great effect in a spare room, where it sits under a four-poster bed and adds a soft, marine feel to the scheme. ‘No matter what the budget is, we don’t like waste,’ says Gail emphatically.