The coastal landscape painter Sarah Adams, who has lived and worked from a terrace house on Duke Street in Padstow since 2006, says: “I make paintings about rock formations. I’m interested in geology and Cornwall was the obvious place for me to head for.”
Adams is the daughter of a master builder from Berkshire, and in her youth her family would visit the Cornish coast for holidays and later moved to Jersey, where her grandmother hails from. She returned to England for a foundation year in Falmouth, followed by studies in Cheltenham and the Royal College of Art in London.
“I ended up back in Jersey for about ten years and I converted what my mother referred to as a cow shed on the west coast into my home. I was one potato field away from the beach, but I decided to make the move to the mainland as I wanted to find somewhere where I had greater visibility as an artist,” she says.
When Adams, 61, came across a run-down property for sale in Padstow’s old town on the cusp of the commercial part of the fishing port — “one foot in the town and one foot in the residential area” — she initially discounted it. In previous guises the house had been a launderette and an electrical goods retailer.
“I was working for a London show but I thought, I’ll just have the day off and I’ll go and see this place,” Adams says. At that point, everything fell into place. “It’s not a listed building, but it’s got good bones, character and all sorts of nooks and crannies.” A second viewing followed and as she walked along the Camel estuary she thought, yes, this is where I want to be.
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Bit by bit, she has transformed and extended it to create a 2,597sq ft seaside home with two bedrooms, a two-storey gallery, studio, workroom and a kitchen, a dining and living area, and a generous study.
“I started with what would become the gallery downstairs, decorated the bedroom and then moved in. I redid the roof and got the studio done. Next, I gutted the middle bit and camped out at the back because the contractors stripped it down to the stone work. It was almost completely empty, apart from a few joists.
“My main windows face east — I really like that because you get the morning light,” says Adams, who shares her home with her collie, Dab.
With its pared-back palette and focus on found objects, the part-commercial, part-residential space has a clean aesthetic, taking a cue from Kettle’s Yard, an art gallery and house in Cambridge. Layers of character have been added by using reclaimed items. “I’m a bit of a sucker for antique door furniture. An arched gothic door came out of a church in the Midlands, and a Georgian door came from Bath. They are joyous things, beautifully made,” she says.
Adams came up with the idea of knocking down a new-build section at the back and replacing it with a beautiful, glazed timber-framed structure made by Carpenter Oak that made the most of the views over the Camel estuary. “We designed it to look like a school house or hall, the sort of building that you’d have in a Cornish fishing village,” Adams says.
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This extension houses the open-plan kitchen with stainless-steel worktops, a dining and living area featuring a double-sided wood-burner converted from a spun steel trawler net bobbin by the stove maker Daniel Harding of Hotpod. “The bobbins are strung to the ropes like beads to weigh down the mouth of the nets,” Adams says. There are funnel-shaped pendant lights that started life as foghorns, and monochrome Mandarin Stone floor tiles have been laid in an irregular pattern.
The garden is built into a hill and comprises terraces, flowerbeds and Delabole Slate-clad walls. “I sieved every shovelful of soil and found a 200-year-old sword hilt. The flowerbeds are full of the sieved topsoil and I did all the stonework. I planted a Magnolia ‘Albatross’ tree that flowered for the first time this year,” she says.
After 18 years at the Padstow Studio, Adams thinks it is time to downsize. “It will be a wrench, but somebody else will write the next chapter of the house. I’ll still be painting in Cornwall.”
She notes the wonderful community and excellent shops and places to eat. The gallery stands a few doors away from Paul Ainsworth’s restaurant No 6 and Rick Stein’s Café, while an excellent farm shop is ten minutes’ stroll away for home-reared beef, lamb and Cornish durum wheat pasta.
“From the point of view as an artist, within seven years of being here, I had a really good London representation,” Adams says. “People have even camped out overnight for my paintings and I’ve had all sorts of opportunities because of the visibility I have here. I’ve really enjoyed showing people the studio. It’s a very flexible building, so it will be interesting to see what the next person does with it.”
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The Padstow Studio is on sale for £1.5 million with Inigo; inigo.com
