Sandy tones and timber cladding evoke Cape Cod beachside living at this revived holiday home on the other east coast – Tayside
You wake in the morning in your large, comfortable bed to sunlight filtering through the curtains. You throw on a dressing gown, cross the room and pull back the drapes to reveal a glazed door. You open it and step out onto the balcony, the sun warming your face as the salty breeze off the sea fills your nostrils. It is peaceful, the only sound the rustling of tall grasses on the sand dunes opposite. Light glitters on the rippling waters… And then you see them: a pod of playful dolphins breaking the surface, leaping into the air and landing with a splash.
This idyllic scene might sound like a dream sequence, but for two lucky clients of Louise Bramhill, it’s a wonderful reality. The interior designer, founder of Glasgow-based Studio LBI, was commissioned by the couple to transform an unimaginative modern apartment by the sea in Tayside into a holiday retreat for them. “We had worked with these clients before on another holiday home overlooking the Kyles of Bute,” says Louise. “Obviously, they were happy with that as they gave us a fairly free hand to design this one. We normally work on larger-scale properties, and this much smaller footprint was actually quite a challenge. We had to be very clever about how we used the space.”
The flat consists of two bedrooms and an open-plan kitchen-living area, and wasn’t in the most inspiring decorative order when Louise and her team first headed to the coast to see it. “I don’t think it had been updated since it was built – it really lacked character,” recalls the designer. “I felt it needed work, a bit of love and attention. It was just old and dated, with a layout that wasn’t very practical.” Her first steps were to make some structural changes to tackle that lack of practicality, before moving on to the aesthetic elements. “We needed to take a partition wall down that was just there as you walked into the kitchen, on the left-hand side,” she explains. “It was cutting off that area, making it a difficult space. It’s a very small kitchen anyway, but having that partition wall made it feel really closed in and tight. Taking it out instantly made it much more usable.”
Her team also converted a small cupboard off the main bedroom into an en-suite toilet. The clients had hoped there would be enough room in there for a shower too, but it just wasn’t possible to squeeze it into the space.
Apart from the petite dimensions, the only other real constraint Louise faced was the flooring. The flat was tiled throughout, with underfloor heating below, and the clients were reluctant to tear it up. Luckily, she and her team are skilled at adapting to situations and limitations as they present themselves.
“We just had to work around the tiled floor,” says Louise. “We softened the look of it by using lots of rugs to break up the flooring for this kind of property; but what we did meant it still ended up looking lovely and cosy.”
With the structural issues resolved, the designer could move on to transforming what the flat looked like, turning it from an uninspired blank canvas into a warm, stylish home that reflects its setting. “Colour was crucial,” says Louise. “We wanted it to feel coastal, taking in the sandy tones of the dunes, with subtle pops of green, for instance. We focused on natural fabrics like leather, linen, jute, wood and brass, again as a way to reflect the surroundings.
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