Best view in St Ives

The gales which hit Porthmeor in the winter, are ferocious but we didn’t want chunky lumpy windows that disrupt the immense blue of the sea, the horizon and the changing skies.

So for the big bay windows Ash Sakula have walked a tightrope as architects and made slim oval timber frames and slim opening windows so there is less dark silhouetting, the delicate frames are less dominant and the sky can creep around them. With this panorama you feel at one with the wheeling gulls, the walkers climbing to the chapel and the families in the rock pools. 

From the beach you can see this unlikely thinness to the frames as they carry the weight of the scantle slated bay structure and lead roof. On balmy days the windows are open, people on the beach wave up to those inside. Those happily settled in cushions with a book simply look down and wave back, or those calling in for lunch wave madly. The ridiculously dramatic landscape becomes your friend. We think the many windows offer that immediacy, the comings and goings, the surprise corner views bring it all home and add to the intimacy of daily life.  

The bay windows are twins. Their joinery details are identical despite the fact the Upper Saltings bay was made in Penzance in 1993 and the Old Saltings ones twenty years later by the same Jenkins & Sons. And yet we always get a thrill from how different the experience is of sitting on the window seat in each place. It is purely down to the 3 metre difference in height over the sand. Downstairs you hover over the beach, feel part of the action and to be fair you climbed no stairs to be there. When the tide is high and the wind is up you could be on a boat.  Upstairs your eye is level with the island and only slightly below the chapel where folk used to pray for the safe return of their loved ones fishing on the sea. So in Upper Saltings you feel on the sheer face of a cliff, up a lighthouse, or at least in a look out. Both have their charms. 

Over the years it has been a battle to keep the weather out with enough regular painting and scarfing with new timber but finally the technology has caught up with our slim frame obsessions. The windows are triple glazed and remade in Accoya a new way of treating ordinary softwood so it becomes dimensionally stable even when you soak it in seawater for years. The wood is impregnated with acetic (a derivative of acetic acid) and heated, which chemically alters the wood at a molecular level by converting its water-absorbing hydroxyl groups into acetyl groups making it less susceptible to shrinking and swelling and decay. At Ash Sakula Architects we love wood and are so happy this is now all both sustainable and beautiful.