A seven-bedroom home overlooking Mundesley beach has come up for sale - and its owners are hoping others will fall in love with it just as much as they did.

When Sarah and Matt Garlick first viewed the property, a seven-bed end terrace off Sea View Road, they fell in love with the views - despite the fact that they were considering buying another home nearby.

“We originally came up to view a property in the village that needed complete renovation,” Sarah says. “We viewed this house as a sort of comparison – a ‘right, same budget but we can move in’ kind of thing, because it didn’t need refiguring. But we just walked in – it’s a real TARDIS, this house – and were blown away by the space and obviously by the views.”

Since then, the couple have gone through the house, room by room, and “put their stamp on it,” Matt says, laboriously removing its woodchip wallpaper, installing a new bathroom and kitchen and converting some of the bedrooms – and the garage – into studios, stock rooms and even a workshop.

But now they are ready to move on, into a property they hope to find with a bigger garden and easier access to Cambridge, which is where they are originally from.

Their home in Mundesley, which is listed for sale with Coast and Country Estate Agents for offers in excess of £475,000, has been a family home, shared between them and their two sons and dogs, as well as their studio and workshop.

A few years ago, Sarah set up Nipper & Moo (nipperandmoo.com), hand-making statement lamps using her vast collection of vintage fabrics as lampshades and wooden bases, which are hand-turned by Matt. Their move to Norfolk gave them more freedom, they say, and allowed them to do more of what they love.

Matt initially started up a street food business making woodfired pizzas, but soon realised it didn’t “tick the boxes” for him, creatively. “It was a good business,” he says, “but it was quite repetitive. Once you’ve made a thousand pizzas... I wanted to do something more creative.

“Sarah’s dad used to make the lamp bases, so I inherited his lathe and immediately knew that this is what I would do. I make the bases for Sarah and my own stuff as well (at glowood.uk) – different bowls, hollow forms, anything round and wooden, I’ll give it a go.”

They converted the garage into a workshop – which has since become Matt’s favourite spot – and transformed one of the bedrooms at the top of the house into Sarah’s studio, complete with a sea view.

“I do spend quite a lot of time just looking out the window,” she says. “I’ve always wanted to see a whale but I haven’t seen one yet. I did see a flare go off though, once, and rang the Coast Guard.”

Almost nine years on, the pair are still just as in love with its views. “When you wake up in the morning and open the curtains and see that view every day, it’s priceless,” says Sarah. “It really is amazing.”

The vistas allow them to be grounded and more connected to the world, Matt says, something which has been especially important over the past few years but particularly so during lockdown. “I feel that we kind of got away without that sort of claustrophobic feeling a lot of people had,” says Matt.

“Even in the strictest lockdown, I could just sort of go and look out the window and it does have some sort of effect on you, being able to see infinitely and knowing there’s no land mass between us and the North Pole. It just goes all way up, you know. That’s pretty special.

“If you’re in a town and it’s a grey day, it’s a grey day, but if you live here and you look out to sea, you can see what weather you’re going to get in half an hour, you can watch it sort of roll in over the sea. It’s lovely to have that, even if it’s going to rain.

“I’ve got a chair in the front room and, at this time of year, when the sun drops below the clouds and lights up the underside of them – that doesn’t get tiring at all. And the swifts are back! That’s the first sign of summer.”

Their home has also become what Sarah calls an “entertaining” house, an ideal space for when family and friends come to stay. “Because it is big, people always want to come and stay when you live by the sea,” she says. “For about five years we used to put on a New Year’s Eve party and I think at one point we had 21 people staying.

“Because they all had kids, we just said ‘here’s a room, bring your roll mats, sleeping bags, you’ve got your own space to go to’. You can get lots of people in, you can have a lot of fun, you know, and then obviously go on lovely walks and go down to the beach, so I think that’s a good selling point.”

The property is so close to the beach, in fact, that Matt refers to the stretch of sand and sea, less than five minutes away, as ‘their’ beach. “It’s completely peaceful and quiet,” he says, compared to some of the other stretches of Mundesley which can, in high summer, see people “crammed in like sardines.”

But the couple also know that, for some, living so close to the sea doesn’t come without its concerns.

Cliff erosion on this part of the coast has been well-documented, including in December last year when this newspaper reported on the “tonnes of sand and soil” thrown on to Mundesley beach after a cliff fall just yards from people’s homes. But it was the first fall of that scale in around a decade, one local said, and was thought to be caused by heavy rainfall.

Matt says that before they moved, it was a concern for them too. “We did some research into it,” he says. “The worst case scenario was 80 years, but obviously you can’t really put a figure on it. There’s bits of the coast going every day.”

The couple decided that, for them, the views were worth the risk. “It is going to go, but you just have to go ‘it won’t be in our lifetime’ and we’ve got this amazing view and that is worth it,” says Sarah. “Living in the house makes you feel that you are always on holiday.”

“We know there’s going to be people who, you know, just are too scared about it, and they’re not the people to buy our house. It will be someone who will have an emotional feeling with it. It’s going to take the right person to come in and fall in love with it.”

Visit coastandcountryea.co.uk for more details. You can also follow Sarah on Instagram at @nipperandmoo and Matt @glowooddesign.

PROPERTY FACTS
Sea View Road, Mundesley
OIEO £475,000
Coast and Country, 01263 800474
www.coastandcountryea.co.uk

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