St Ives is famous for its 20th-century artist’s colony, home to Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, Peter Lanyon and Robert Borlase Smart, who founded the St Ives School after WWI.  Nearly a century later, his modernist home is for sale via The Modern House – including an artist’s studio.

Smart’s Bishops Road residence was built in 1928 in an early modernist style that revolves around sea views and incredible Atlantic light. The artist’s home has been modernised since his death in 1948, but it retains much of the character and features, with wide Crittall windows bathing rooms in glorious light.

In the reception, original narrow plank floor boards run underfoot, and there are several period feature fireplaces, with intricate brick inlays and stone hearths to be found across the seaside property, still with working chimneys.

Interiors have a timeless, breezy feel, with whitewashed panelled ceilings and walls and soft linen furnishings. Upstairs, things take a monochrome twist with blackened floors and checkerboard tiling in the updated bathrooms.

A quarter-acre of hydrangea gardens envelop the Cornwall property, which has an octagonal-shaped outbuilding that’s used as a studio space and views over the rooftops of St Ives down to the sea.

The Modern House is listing the St Ives home for £1.75m.

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