Dorset Coastal Retreat

The house sat at the end of a track, with an uninterrupted view south across the Channel. The architect had done the hard work: the building’s orientation was correct, the fenestration generous, the proportions of the main living space appropriate to the view it was built to frame. Our task was to furnish and finish it in a way that made the view the point rather than the interior.

The ground floor was treated as a single material environment. The floor throughout — kitchen, dining area, sitting room, and the wide terrace beyond — was laid in a riven Purbeck limestone sourced from a quarry forty minutes from the site. The colour shifts from pale grey to a warm buff depending on the light, and the riven surface gives grip in wet conditions without the utilitarian associations of a textured tile. Because the floor ran unbroken from inside to outside, the threshold between the two was reduced to a flush-glazed sliding door that disappeared into the wall: the sitting room simply became the terrace when the weather permitted.

Furniture was kept low and upholstered in a palette of warm sand and pale sage — colours that, against the Purbeck floor and the view beyond, read as entirely settled rather than chosen. The one deliberate material note was a dining table in hand-finished travertine, its surface left unsealed so that it will record the life of the house over time: a water glass ring here, a wine splash there. In a building this close to a coast this wild, the idea of a surface that could not be marked seemed wrong.