Ultimately, it was the view that sold it. When Bianca Fincham and her husband bought a Georgian house on the Cornish coast – for a time their home and now a charming holiday rental – they knew that one day they would also transform the small, single-storey garage on the hill into a welcoming holiday house. When funds finally allowed in 2024, its elevated position, offering a clear line of sight to St Michael’s Mount and a turquoise-blue sea, heavily influenced the design.
‘It was a bit of ugly building to be honest,’ says Bianca of the old structure, a stocky off-white cube built by a former owner with a lichen-covered roof. ‘It became a dumping ground for us.’ Nestled between fig trees and reached via granite steps, the new conversion, a far cry from the run-of-the-mill garage it was once, has now been clad in charred Siberian larch, a hardy material suited to its coastal position. It’s a striking contrast to the Georgian main house, Pembroke Lodge. ‘We wanted to make it like a modern boat shed,’ says Bianca, founder of PR company Rainbowwave. The nearby village of Newlyn provided much inspiration, with its rich boating and fishing heritage, but coastal buildings around New England and in Norway also inspired the renovation.
Glass doors and windows frame the views beyond the cabin.
Dean Hearne
After falling in love with an architect-designed holiday let in nearby Mousehole, Bianca called on the same architects, Studio West, to help enact her vision. While they had been successful with planning permission relatively quickly back in 2021, the process of scaling the original structure of the garage up to double-height to create a mezzanine level wasn’t without complications. ‘We had to underpin the whole building because it didn’t have enough groundwork,’ Bianca recalls. ‘You pay per pole and per metre and I think they ended up getting down to nine metres and not hitting anything. We were like “oh my God, we had not budgeted for this at all!”’ In the end, 10 steel poles were needed to stabilise the structure. In addition, all of this was going on in torrential Cornish rain, while Bianca was working in London and while guests were coming and going from Pembroke Lodge, so you can understand why the end result must have felt a very long way away when the work began last January.
Bianca, who grew up locally, saw an opportunity to embed Cornwall – its people, history and natural beauty – as deeply into the house as the structure itself is into the Cornish earth. Here, she turned to local builders and tradespeople, some of who she had grown up with, to create a space that would leave guests both impressed and warmed by the space, with a ground floor open-plan living space and separate bathroom and a mezzanine level bedroom.