A £1.5million Pet Shop Buy: The beachfront Bauhaus hideaway built by a 1980s band manager - and the neighbours are stars too
mail on sunday 28 june 2014
It’s a windy day on the Sussex coast but inside Tom Watkins’s Bauhaus-inspired beachfront house, you would never know.
Tom, who used to manage the Pet Shop Boys, Bros and East 17, explains that he learnt how to trap sound when designing recording studios.
He replicated the triple-glazing he used in his recording studios in his home, which he calls The Big White House – now on sale for £1.55 million.
The house is on Pett Level, just outside the village of Pett between Rye and Hastings.
‘I want it to remain quite exclusive,’ he says of the area. ‘People say “Let’s put it on the map,” and I think, “No, let’s not!”
'Paul Merton lives round here, so does illusionist Derren Brown, but it’s not for families who want to live here full-time.
'There are no schools or hospitals, so it’s for people either looking for a retreat or a gay couple, I guess.’
The house was featured on Channel 4’s Grand Designs in 2004, and Kevin McCloud, the programme’s presenter, described it as a ‘perfect little sugar lump’.
‘I loved it,’ Tom says of making the programme. ‘It was an exercise in blagging.
'What I liked most of all about it was manipulating the contractors and the suppliers to give me the bits and pieces I wanted either at a very healthy discount or for free!
'I built the entire house, including all the marble on the floor and the bathrooms, for about half of what I think it would normally cost.’
He adds that he had a specific period in mind for the house. ‘I built a 1930s tribute to a Bauhaus warehouse,’ he says. ‘I liked the idea of municipal buildings. I liked the hard-and-fast geometry that they specialised in.’
Before he entered the pop world, Tom, 64, was a designer, working for Terence Conran.
‘I’d given up designing to manage all the bands,’ he says, ‘so I had this kind of yearning to aesthetically practise what I’d been taught all those years ago. I’d been at the London College of Furniture.
‘When I worked for Terence Conran, I designed many huge public interiors: the London Corn Exchange, Heathrow’s Terminal 3.'
The Big White House currently has two bedrooms but could easily be used as a three-bedroom house. Rye and Hastings stations are nearby for trains to London.
Tom adds that it is also convenient for the Continent: ‘Ashford is 20 minutes away, and then you can get on the Eurostar.’
He wants to sell to be nearer King’s College Hospital in Camberwell, South London, where he is being treated for liver cancer. His partner, Marc Evans, 50, a theatre manager, has a flat very near the hospital.
Jason Stubbs, of estate agents Phillips and Stubbs, says: ‘The Big White House is a big design statement, fully utilising this unique coastal setting, with direct access to the beach and with widespread views across the Channel and along dramatic sandstone cliffs.’