Introduction

Note

You can read and search the most up-to-date version of this guide by visiting https://trelas.co.uk from the Trelas WiFi

Welcome from all our family to all of yours!

You have made a fine choice for your holiday – St. Ives is one of the most wonderful holiday destinations in the country, and we think that Trelas is a special place for family and friends to enjoy time together in this unique location.

In this ‘user guide’ we have set out to provide all of the key information you need to make the most of your stay in Trelas. Hopefully, you’ll find all that you need here, but if not you can refer to instruction manuals for all appliances and the like which you will find in the black document box kept in the utility room.

We think Trelas is a special place. We have been visiting Cornwall for many years and on one family holiday in 2012, while staying in one of the houses in Bedford Road, we spotted a building plot. It had been on the market for a while and although it already had planning permission for a two bedroom home no one seemed interested in it. There were good reasons for that! This was mainly due to the severely sloping nature of the site and the difficulty in building on the plot.

We could immediately see the potential for a wonderful family home, set into the hillside, overlooking St. Ives Bay, modern and clean, energy efficient and a beautiful location for holidays. So, being naive and enthusiastic, we bought it!

It took some time to complete the purchase, then to obtain new planning permission for a four bedroomed dwelling, but eventually we appointed a builder who started work in February 2015.

Fourteen months of blood, sweat and tears later, the house was finally completed in April 2016.

We’re a large family and we love to holiday together, often with friends in tow, so we’ve had quite a bit of experience of holiday homes and cottages and have a clear idea of what we like. When we set out to build Trelas we anticipated that we would make it available to others to use, so we were determined to equip it with everything that we would like to see in a holiday home.

So right from when we first spoke to our architect Chris, we knew we wanted a bright and airy feel to the building, so he designed it with lots of windows and high ceilings to flood the place with the wonderful St. Ives light. To squeeze four bedrooms into the design Chris had to put one of them (bedroom 2) completely underground, so we planned to have a light well to throw illumination into the room from the floor above. This is a very tranquil room, buried deep in the earth, soundproofed from the world outside, and hopefully you’ll enjoy spending a quiet moment in the reading corner beneath the roof light. This is a special place.

We know how mums and dads love the pleasure of having their own bathrooms, so we asked for two of the bedrooms to have en suites. Chris managed to squeeze them in. You’ll have to fight amongst yourselves to decide who gets to sleep in bedrooms one and two!

We wanted a lovely open space where all the family could relax together, playing games or watching a movie, so Chris came up with our amazing galleried lounge area, with windows on three sides and in the roof, giving fabulous views over the St. Ives Bay. This room is bright and airy at all times of the year, whatever the weather.

When the weather is good enough we love eating outdoors so Chris designed for us a combined kitchen and dining room that extends, through bi-fold doors, into a spacious decked area where children can play safely and the kitchen is just a few strides away.

We worked with our builder, Viv, to come up with a way to maximise the garden space so that it can all be utilised. So rather than have a sloping garden that follows the contours of the hillside, we created level terraced areas so the garden is split across two main sections. In the lower garden we created two large stores so that we can securely lock away surf boards, bikes and all that other paraphernalia that families take away on holiday. This storage served another purpose: it enabled us to extend the area of the upper garden level to create a much larger deck than would otherwise be possible.

We know that kids come back from the beach with their sandals full of sand, so we had an outdoor shower fitted – you’ll find it in the lower garden level.

When it came to furnishing the place, we had help from two local interior designers, Caroline and Louise. We told them that comfortable beds were top of the list. The first time we stayed in Trelas we had one of our best nights sleep ever in bedroom one!

We’re all Internet addicts. Terrible, isn’t it? So to satisfy our cravings and those of our guests we planned for a WiFi network that will reach reliably all around the house, and we subscribe to a fibre Internet service from BT that means videos can be streamed from iPlayer and other services without a glitch. We also planned at the outset for it to be a connected home, so all of the TVs in the house (yes, we put one in every room to prevent viewing disputes!) are Internet connected - you can use your Netflix or other streaming video service account (if you have one) on all of them and browse the web.

Speaking of televisions, one of the things we love as a family is to spend an evening together watching a great movie. So we installed a 50 inch TV with a surround sound home cinema system and bought a giant sofa. We hope you enjoy watching some of the discs we have in the huge collection of DVD and Blu-ray titles on the bookshelves in the corridor, or working your way through the Netflix catalogue.

We love sitting around a table having a family meal together, so we had bench seating fitted in the kitchen with a lovely reclaimed timber table around which we can fit all the family, plus a few extras.

When it came to heating Trelas, we just had to go with an underfloor system. There is really nothing quite like it for comfort and luxury. We love to wake up on winter mornings and walk down to the kitchen feeling the warmth of the floors under our feet. In the spring and summer months, Trelas is so well insulated that you will find the temperature is quite comfortable without requiring the heating to be turned on.

We associate the smell of burning wood with holidays. We don’t have a wood-burning stove at home, but there has been one of these in the living area of a number of the holiday cottages in which we’ve stayed over the years, so obviously we wanted one in the lounge of Trelas. We went with a modern and compact design because we knew the heat that these things put out can be overpowering, especially in conjunction with underfloor heating. If you are spending time at Trelas in the winter then enjoy relaxing around the wood burner with a hot drink. Be prepared to be quite toasty - the wood burner throws out a lot of heat!

We saved the best until last. A few years ago we had an outdoor wood-burning oven installed at our main home and have never looked back. So when we planned the build of Trelas we intended from the outset to provide the same. If you enjoy cooking, and/or burning stuff, then there is really nothing like cooking with an open fire. We have a long-standing family tradition of pizza making - where others cook a Sunday meal of roast meat and vegetables, we have always baked homemade pizzas. Creating artisan pizzas in a wood-fired oven at a temperature of around 500 Celcius is something really special - pizzas cook in around three minutes, with wonderfully light crust and sizzling toppings. Go on, try it out! It’s obviously a lot more labour-intensive than turning on an electric cooker, but so much more fun! And there is something wonderful about sitting outdoors as a family, with a glass of wine, preparing food as you go.

Of course, pizza isn’t the only thing you can cook. You can make anything in a wood-fired oven, but just like using an Aga range cooker, it’s something that requires a bit of practice since you don’t have the same control over the temperature. So try it out, and then come back again to perfect your technique!

Trelas is a special place for us. We love spending time here and we are sure that you will too. We’d love to hear what you think, so please let us have your feedback and a photo of you all to put in our gallery: please visit https://trelas.co.uk and follow the instructions you’ll find there.

Enjoy!