A breathtaking home created by a genius architect on one of the most beautiful headlands in Cornwall, on the market for the first time in almost 40 years

From Cornwall to Somerset, there has been a welcome surge of activity in the market for coastal and country houses, reflected in the launch of some notable West Country properties in Country Life this week. The most dramatic of all comes via Ian Lillicrap of Truro-based agents Lillicrap Chilcott, who seeks ‘offers over £4 million’ for the The Gate House, near Mavagissey in Cornwall.

This celebrated Grade II-listed house sits atop Chapel Point, and is one of three remarkable coastal houses that were designed and built by the Arts-and-Crafts architect John A. Campbell between 1934 and 1939.

The sale follows the death in 2020 of the internationally renowned architect John (‘Jack’) Bonnington, who, with his wife, Esme, bought The Gate House through the same agents in 1987, having seen it advertised in the pages of Country Life.

An article by the magazine’s then Architectural Editor, Christopher Hussey (October 19, 1945), reveals the motivation behind Campbell’s dream of building a coastal village of 20 houses on the wild Cornish headland he bought in 1932. According to Hussey, the forward-thinking architect’s primary aim was to discover whether good masonry and carpentry were still economically viable for a small house in 20th-century England.

He explains the thinking behind Campbell’s remarkable undertaking:

‘The first requirement for his experiment was a site with plenty of stone available. He chose Cornwall, and a spot which, because it was remote, was both beautiful and cheap. He set off ill-equipped as a practical builder, with no knowledge of stone quarrying but with plenty of warnings from friends of inevitable ruin.

‘Two years of hard thought and hard manual work followed, with a few men: carpenter Harry Bell, stonemason Arthur Ball and Campbell himself. No modern appliance within reach of his limited resources was over-looked; a couple of sticks of gelignite saved many man-hours in preparing the rocky site and blasting the material; a donkey handled by his young son provided the chief source of motive power for haulage and transport’.

In the event, only three houses were built at Chapel Point, the Second World War having intervened to stop construction in 1939. After the war, Campbell returned to Mevagissey to complete his project, but the planning permission had lapsed and he was forced to re-submit the plans. After months of updating and redrawing, he finally completed the revised plans in August 1947. Returning along the coast having delivered them to the planning office by hand, he lost his footing, fell into the sea and drowned. Ironically, the plans were approved, but never implemented.

According to the American Home Style magazine (1993), The Gate House was ‘in a bad way, having been lived in by two families, when Jack and Esme Bonnington bought it with a view to refurbishing it as a weekend retreat. Eventually they decided that the only option was to demolish part of the property and rebuild it, which entailed removing all but one of the floors, stripping back the stonework and grit-blasting the walls.

It took three years to complete the work, which saw the interior transformed into a practical and extremely modern space, where uniformity is key. Most floors are finished in marble; almost everything else in white’.

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Approached from the sea, as Hussey did in 1945, the three very unusual houses, of which The Gate House is the largest, seemed to him ‘detached from anything else in England, as if occupying a Utopian island in some fairy sea. They share that quality with two of Edwin Lutyens’s most appealing and successful realisations of the improbable — Lindisfarne, and the houses on Lambay Island off the coast of Ireland — although those were both to varying extents reconstructions of existing buildings’.

For Mr Lillicrap, the approach by land from the end of Chapel Point Lane over a sweeping private gated drive is a setting like no other in Cornwall, ‘intriguing, mysterious and enthralling all in one’.

The Gate House, completed in 1937, is the most elaborately designed of Campbell’s three houses — a tower house with steeply pitched Delabole-slate roofs, arched windows with semi-circular balconies facing the beach and sea, an arched loggia, large sheltered inner court and whitened stone walls with a semi-circular staircase tower flanking the main entrance door.

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The accommodation divides into two interdependent units to either side of the entrance. A long hall is flanked by cupboards containing boilers, electric meters and kitchen appliances, all cleverly concealed behind a wall of white melamine doors and panelling — a device used by Bonnington throughout the house to create interiors inspired by the Bauhaus architect, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who encouraged ‘the elimination of superfluous detail’.

Accommodation on three floors includes entrance and main halls, an unusual slate staircase, a study, drawing room, dining room, kitchen/breakfast room, ground-floor bedroom and integral annexe.

There are two en-suite bedrooms on the first floor and a barrel-vaulted living room or fourth bedroom on the second floor.

The Gate House stands in 1¾ acres of gardens and grounds, with frontage to mean high water on Colona beach, the rockery foreshore and the north side of Chapel Point. Elsewhere in the grounds, an old summerhouse, a croquet lawn and sheltered lawns face out across the foreshore, the beach and the spectacular Cornish coastline.

The Gate House at Chapel Point, Mevagissey, is for sale at £4 million — see more details.