A two-bedroom apartment located on one of Cromer's most iconic streets has come up for sale almost half a million after a huge project to restore it.
When Simon Maddison first saw inside what would become his Little Norfolk Beach House, he knew it had potential.
For starters, it is situated on one of Cromer’s most photographed streets – Jetty Street – where pastel-coloured buildings line either side of the narrow thoroughfare and where, at the end, you can see just a slither of where the sky meets the sea.
Secondly, it had a garden – but not just any garden.
“I don’t think there’s any other garden on Jetty Street that looks down the beach,” he says. “They all back on to buildings.”
How the property looks now is a world away from how it looked when Simon first saw it.
It was on the market with Watsons at the time and had been a bookies’ office, chemist and newsagent before.
“I walked in and thought ‘oh my god, it’s absolutely awful,’” he says. And yet he still wasn’t fazed.
“I don’t worry about what it looks like when I walk in a place because you can create anything. When I walked around and into the kitchen, and I saw the sea out the window, I thought I’d buy it.”
Simon is something of a seasoned property developer, although it’s a passion rather than his day job.
He runs Planet Pursuits, based in Wiltshire, but has bought and renovated homes in Norfolk for the past 30 years.
He bought, renovated and now runs Meadow House in Mundesley as the Norfolk Beach House, a boutique holiday home which offers up to 14 guests the ‘ultimate’ Norfolk retreat, complete with sea views and a hot tub.
He intended for the property on Jetty Street to become part of the brand, but now he’s spotted something else and says he doesn’t have the time, so he’s selling it on. It’s listed with abbotFox for £495,000.
Accommodation comprises a traditional entrance hall, two good-sized double bedrooms and a reception room with sliding doors into the kitchen, with property valuer Samantha Withers describing it as an “absolutely stunning” ground-floor apartment.
“It boasts stunning sea views from the kitchen and if you step out of the front door you are about 30 steps to beach access, with stunning views of the pier,” she says.
Owner Simon says he likes restoring properties – in fact, 12 Jetty Street is one of several he’s completed in north Norfolk over the past few years. “My day job is event management, I run an event company, so I’m always creating something for a client,” he says.
“I build parties for people and put on big team building events and it’s very much the same principle - placing a seed of an idea and making it happen for a client.
“We built a forest-themed party last week as a complete surprise for a client. They were having dinner in one room, and then we did a big reveal and they walked into an enchanted forest, but the good thing about that sort of stuff is that I have to build them in a day and then take them out in a day and there’s a lot of logistics that go into it.”
Restoring a property is the same principle, he says, it just happens over a longer period of time.
Jetty Street took around a year to complete, with Simon travelling up on weekends and doing a lot of the graft himself. “The bits I couldn’t do – the electrical, the plumbing – I got guys in and I was labour for them.”
He has had to renovate “literally everything”, reconfiguring the layout entirely to transform its “horrible, poky little rooms” into two bigger-sized bedrooms and replacing its avocado bathroom suite. He’s also installed new cornicing and ceiling roses to give it back its elegance.
“It was all Regency, 1830s, but every feature had been ripped out of it – over a period of time, people take all the good stuff out.”
He teamed up with Dan at Norfolk Reclamation, who he says sourced him “a load” of nine-inch Victorian floorboards, which allowed Simon to do the whole house in the same floor.
He also created a new cabin bed in one of the rooms to act as a second bedroom, repositioned the window so that you can see down the beach from your bed and installed a roll-top tub.
“I love baths in bedrooms,” he says. “The other day I was walking down the street and I heard someone say ‘that’s the house that’s got a bed in the bathroom’ and I was like ‘no, it’s a bath in the bedroom!’” he laughs.
“The way I look at it, in Georgian times, they used to put [their] tin bath out and pour water in it in the bedroom. I love that luxury of having a bath, you know, lighting candles, so that was the only way I could get a bath in there as well.”
Some of the work also required planning permission, which Simon says was a voyage of discovery in itself.
“I got planning to push out into the garden with a door because [it] was a window overlooking the garden and I had a hunch that maybe there was a door there before,” he says. “When planning said ‘no, you can’t knock through’, I stripped all the plaster off the wall and saw there was a brick line where a door would have been.
“I sent photos to them and they said ‘oh, that’s reinstated so you can have a door there’ and that’s just made the place – a big sliding door opening on to the garden.
“That was really interesting. I love stripping back all the walls and seeing how it could have been.”
Simon says he also built the kitchen, taking inspiration from the huge dresser in the kitchen at the nearby Blickling Estate. “I hate fitted kitchens,” he says, “so that was built out of two dresser bases that I bought off eBay.”
“I bought the MDF sheets and then made it look like a dresser. I painted the base unit and fitted my own sink and I think the whole thing cost £900 – apart from the Aga, that was ridiculous!”
Simon describes his overall style as “sort of old school” but says he uses really nice materials and good quality wallpaper, furnishings, fixtures and fittings to complete the look.
He says he gets some of his inspiration from the Gunton Arms nearby, which he says has really put that part of Norfolk on the map. “I love how they do that lovely combination of period furniture but with a nice, updated feel. So using really nice textures, materials and wallpaper.”
But to do it well, he says you need to spend the money – there’s no point in doing it on the cheap.
Simon has always considered Cromer as a good place to invest in. “It’s a bit like the East End of London,” he says. “Everyone ignored it and then you run out of property and you think ‘oh, there’s actually some nice properties here – they were just above kebab shops.
“You look at Cromer and it has that Victorian splendour but sometimes you’ve just got to look up a little bit. And it is starting to happen.”
Shops like Fig & Olive and Constance & Thyme are helping to lift the town, Simon says, and its house prices are comparatively cheap for what you get in terms of location.
“You can buy something for £400,000-500,000, which is a lot, but relative to what you pay for it in somewhere like Brighton… And you're by the seaside and it's a gorgeous seaside.”
He says he also likes the mix of community in the town – so much so that he’s been living in the flat himself while it’s for sale on the market.
“I’m kind of loving living [here],” he admits. “I can open up my kitchen door and hear the sea. It’s lovely.”
“Unless I get the right price for it, I'm not going to let it go. It’s a unique property.”
PROPERTY FACTS
Jetty Street, Cromer
Guide price: £495,000
abbotFox, 01603 660000
www.abbotfox.co.uk
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