Open House: micro-developers Pamela and Leo Nathan-Meyers on their third project together, a meticulously renovated sea-facing flat in St Leonards-on-Sea

In 2018, Leo and Pamela Nathan-Meyers decided to leave south London for the seaside town of St. Leonards-on-Sea. Charmed by its sense of community, the couple – who describe themselves as ‘micro-developers’ – were looking for a home for themselves, but also unloved flats and houses which they could transform into ‘spaces that are full of heart’. They struck lucky with a flat in a Grade II-listed house they bought as their own home, and came across this flat in a period building, perched just above the town’s Marina, a few months later in April 2019. Ripe for renovating, it was just the project they craved and is their third together.

As the flat comes onto the market, Pamela and Leo tell us how they discovered and renovated the space, the importance of community spirit, and why they’ll never cut corners.

Leo: “We’d been living in Brockley in south London and I’d been focussed on new-builds, making the most of disused car parks and empty stretches of land. One day, Pamela was driving along the coast and came across St Leonards-on-Sea, which was full of these incredible Georgian-fronted buildings.

“It’s the work of the architect James Burton and his son, Decimus, who had a dream to basically create Bloomsbury-on-Sea back in the 19th century. They’re not particularly well-known, but Decimus was responsible for the Temperate House at Kew Gardens, London Zoo and the forecourt at Buckingham Palace.”

Pamela: “Over the years, the houses had been chopped up into flats. I felt like they were crying out, and said to Leo, ‘it’s now or never – we have to leave London.’ It didn’t make sense anymore to do new-builds with all of these unloved but amazing buildings just sitting there.

“We started looking at places, and the first flats we saw were absolutely terrible and smelled awful. I started to think I might have to do it alone, but thankfully the estate agent showed us more and we came across what is now our own flat in a Grade II-Listed, stucco-fronted house. It hadn’t been touched for 30 years, but the light was so poetic and it had all of this beautiful 1970s furniture. We decided to make the move.”

Leo: “We immediately felt this incredible sense of community – almost everyone would talk about how much they loved living here. Discovering somewhere in which everyone was invested in the community was so different compared to London – it made us feel accepted, and also involved with its ethos and culture. I remember we went to an illustration festival when we first moved here and a man drew a picture of us both and then gave us a hug. It’s a special place.

“We found this flat in April 2019, soon after we’d bought our own place. It’s spread across the second and third floors of a handsome house designed by Decimus Burton. It’s sort of neo-Roman in style, high on a road behind the Marina that overlooks the seafront.

“It had been a council rental and hadn’t been refurbished since about the 1970s, so it had poor electrics and a clunky layout. The toilet was basically plonked in the entrance hall and it had a tiny 2×3 metre kitchen.”

Pamela: “To me, it felt like a home that was stuck and didn’t know quite what it was. The whole space felt quite fragmented, but there was beautiful light flowing in through the large windows, which had been carefully placed by Decimus to account for where the sun sets and rises. We loved that he’d thought so meticulously about these details and aimed to respect that in our design. We wanted the space to feel sacred.”

Leo: “For us, what makes a good interior is working from the inside, considering the building’s history, but also imbuing it with emotion and memory. Here, we felt a great responsibility to create a space that could hold someone’s aspirations and fears, while also creating a sense of belonging.

“We wanted it to feel graceful and modern, with an earthy palette. We stripped everything back and basically started from the bottom, redoing the electrics and plumbing. We got rid of the skirting and cornices to create a clean backdrop and replaced some of the windows with black aluminium frames.

“We opened up the two main rooms on the first floor to create an open-plan living and kitchen area that ran the length of the house and added glass-panelled bi-fold doors between the two spaces so you could close it off or open it up as you wish. The living section has a quiet, almost gallery-like feel to it and we added internal windows so that you glimpse the space as you walk into the flat from the hall.”

Pamela: “We started building in the summer of 2019, but a few months in we realised that something wasn’t quite right – we should have been halfway there and it was still a building site. We ended up calling it quits with the builders, re-evaluating and finding a new team of builders, carpenters and painters. In many ways, it helped us grow – we found people aligned with our vision who were considering zero bills housing and eco-frames in their work.”

Leo: “When we started work upstairs, we realised how everything on the roof had been done wrong. We added three massive Velux Cabrio windows on the sea-facing side, which meant we had to raise the roof’s pitch by four degrees and redo the entire thing, including insulation and tiling. It’s a sort of Dutch barn roof. It was a hilariously challenging process, trying to replace a roof in the wettest February imaginable, but the windows mean that we’ve essentially converted one side of this room into glass.

“The insulation is Icynene Open Celled Foam – a sustainable option that is used in Canada a lot and can tolerate temperatures of minus 30 degrees.

“We moved the main bathroom upstairs, keeping the two decent-sized bedrooms, with one facing south. We exposed the rafters in each room – these were the original muscle of the place and it was nice to keep them. We ended up knocking down the stud wall that divided them and moving it by just 40cm – it may not seem like a lot but it makes a huge difference. These were the sort of decisions that we committed to making right at the start of the project.”

Pamela: “We agreed at the beginning to make the most caring, loving and sustainable choices we could, both in terms of materials and design. We thought very carefully about ratios throughout the whole project, as they’re so intrinsic to how we live and relate to our surroundings. We researched every piece and material that we used to ensure they were well made and would have a long life – everything from the IFO Electric lights in the bathroom to the infrared heating system throughout.

“It was important for us to use materials that were as natural and sustainable as possible. I had this mad idea to paint the walls with clay paints, which I was making in our garden at home using flour and tapioca. In the end, we used lime-plaster for the kitchen and living area and one of the bedrooms – partly because it was impossible to get normal gypsum in the pandemic, but more importantly because it lets the building breathe. It takes in any water, which is especially important being so close to the sea. It gives a lovely, earthy finish.

“The hall is painted in five different colours, but you don’t notice, because it’s just incremental tonal shifts. We did the same in a bedroom too, where one colour goes down the wall and another wraps around you. The ensuite bathroom gave us a chance to be bolder with colour – we mixed orange and yellow Johnson tiles on the walls, with the darker tones at the bottom progressing to lighter ones at the top. It was partly inspired by a bathroom I’d seen in the American drama Six Feet Under.

“We kept the original wooden flooring where possible, surrounding a cut-out rectangle of it in the living area with micro-concrete. It required a huge amount of forethought and planning to ensure that we built it up enough to meet the floorboards perfectly.

“The kitchen worktops are made from bamboo, because it’s super durable but also grows very fast and requires little water, and we clad the main bathroom upstairs in cedar. I wanted to bring an element of a sauna in, and the lovely thing is that when it heats up, it smells beautiful.

“We’re making a short film called Story of the Build, to honour the builders, carpenters, roofers, plasterers and the other tradesmen involved in the project – without their knowledge, courage and persistence it wouldn’t have been possible.”

Leo: “Building took just under a year, but was a bit stop-start due to the pandemic. We hope, in a sense, to have created a blank canvas, which allows the person living there to choose how they belong to it. For us, it was about earthing the home into the community.”

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