By Isaac Zamet
On the Kent coast, just 21 miles from France, a white-walled art deco house sits within the sheltered sweep of St Margaret’s Bay. Mermaid Cottage, currently on the market for £1.75mn, is just one of four houses in the row, positioned so that its windows frame the English Channel from almost every room.
For the past eight years, the three-bedroom house has been owned by horticulturalist Lara Jewitt and her partner, Mark Sawyer. The couple moved to St Margaret’s Bay full-time after the pandemic and purchased an adjoining plot to the house, where they set about transforming the space.
“We wanted to have both an entertaining space and a special kind of coastal shingle garden,” Jewitt says. Sawyer began with the garden’s defining structure: a curved wall inspired by Berthold Lubetkin’s penguin pool at London Zoo. It offers privacy and shelter from the elements while preserving an unbroken line of sight to the sea.
The arcing garden wall embraces a sunken seating area with outdoor sofas while a floating walkway connects it to the house. The result is a flexible social space — summer evenings might feature outdoor cinema screenings, while on quiet winter mornings, the owners simply lower a wooden library ladder to the beach, to start the day with a cold swim before an outdoor shower among the grasses.
Yet it’s the planting that’s the real star. Two decades at Kew Gardens took Jewitt to the top of horticultural practice, during which time she managed the Princess of Wales Conservatory, rock garden and tropical and alpine nurseries. Her career as a plantswoman means she continues to serve as an RHS judge, handing out awards at Chelsea Flower Show.
Jewitt adopts garden designer and author Beth Chatto’s mantra, “right plant, right place”, reflected in Jewitt’s observations of species around the globe. As she says, “seeing plants in their natural habitat gives you real insight into how to grow them”. Much of Jewitt’s inspiration came from the beach beyond the wall. “I look to garden in harmony with nature, not against it,” she says. Sea holly, horned poppy, thrift and wild fennel that grow on the beach unaided represented obvious sources of inspiration. Derek Jarman’s garden at Prospect Cottage, Dungeness, an hour’s drive away, gave further direction for fitting a coastal garden into its wider landscape.
Jewitt’s travels abroad as a botanical horticulturist also yielded important references such as Namibia’s welwitschia, which can survive for 1,000 years on just two leaves, Kenton Seth’s crevice gardens at Denver Botanic Gardens and Beth Chatto’s pioneering dry planting at Hyde Hall. Transforming the plot at St Margaret’s Bay required breaking up a solid chalk base, importing 15 tonnes of soil and topping it with 45 tonnes of gravel in five different grades for a naturalistic look.
Around the perimeter, tamarisk — known as salt cedar — forms a living windbreak. Closer in, pheasant’s tail grass from New Zealand plays with the light, while coastal stalwarts such as eryngiums mingle with pines and flashes of colour like red kniphofias.
Jewitt’s experimental streak drove her to innovate. A passion for tender plants, sparked by a trip to the cloud forests of Costa Rica, led her to make the most of the bay’s mild, frost-free microclimate to grow exotics such as Geranium maderense. This tender plant self-seeds in the shelter of the bay but would struggle even a short climb up the cliff. Unusual agaves, aloes and echiums provide sculptural punctuation.
The history of Mermaid Cottage adds a further theatrical flourish. Noël Coward leased the house for seven years before passing it on to Ian Fleming. The property’s elegant 1920s geometry recalls a period of glamour, when guests including Katherine Hepburn swam off the shore. Today it is Jewitt’s work outside the walls that defines the property’s allure: a garden in dialogue with the setting and rooted in local ecology.
Photography: Strutt & Parker
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