What the sea does to a building.

Two hundred metres from open water, the air itself is mildly corrosive. You notice it first in small things — a hinge that stiffens, a screw head that blooms orange — and then you start to see the whole building as a slow argument with the weather.

Why everything here is either wood or nothing

The old houses on this coast are timber not because timber is beautiful but because it fails gracefully. A board that has taken forty years of salt goes silver and soft at the surface and is otherwise fine. The same four decades will eat a steel fixing entirely, which is why traditional joinery here uses as little metal as it can, and why what metal there is tends to be visible and replaceable.

When we rebuilt in 2019 we kept the frame and replaced almost everything attached to it. The frame was sound. The things that had given up were, without exception, the things that had been added later in materials that assumed a milder country.

Maintenance as a design decision

The most useful question about any detail here is not how it looks but how it will be repaired. A cladding board that can be swapped in an afternoon is worth more than a cleverer system that has to be cut out. The deck is screwed, not glued. The window reveals are deep enough to stand in with a brush.

None of this is visible to a guest, and that is rather the point. The house looks unchanging because it is being changed constantly, in small pieces, by people who expect to be doing it again.