Who paints render in St Ives, and how do you get anything done in Downalong?
A decorator does. Exterior painting in St Ives is mostly render and painted timber, and the wash-down, the repairs and the coats are our trade rather than a builder's. The second question is the real one, because the hardest part of a job in Downalong is not the painting.
Downalong is the old fishing quarter between the harbour and Porthmeor: granite cottages packed along lanes laid out for handcarts, not vans, and most of them holiday lets now. You cannot park outside, and in summer the streets through the middle of town are closed to traffic for most of the day. So a job there is planned around carrying. Paint, dust sheets and a short tower in sections come in by hand from the nearest place a van can stop, early, before the town wakes up, and the van goes back to a car park. We would rather say that at the quote than discover it on the Monday.
Time of year is the other half. From Easter to the end of October the cottages are booked back to back, so exterior work and any full interior repaint in Downalong belongs between November and March, when the house is empty and there is room to stand a ladder. In season it is what fits a changeover: a marked hallway, a bathroom ceiling, a front door. Much of the arranging is done with a letting agent or a keyholder rather than the owner, so we agree keys, alarm codes, water and power before the day, and send photographs as each part is finished so nobody has to drive down to check.
White render, salt and the wind off the bay
St Ives is a painted town. Rendered walls in white or pale colours, painted sash and casement windows, doors in blue and green, much of it facing the Atlantic across Porthmeor or the bay across the harbour. Spray reaches the seaward frontages on any decent blow, the render holds the salt and stays damp, and as it dries the salt comes to the surface and pushes the paint off from behind. That is the flaking on so many walls near the front, and why a coat put on in a hurry between bookings rarely sees a second winter.
So the preparation is the job. Render is washed down with clean water, more than once where the salt is heavy, and left to dry. Chalky paint is bound, hollow or cracked render cut out and made good, and on the old granite cottages the coating is a breathable masonry paint so the wall can still let moisture out. Sills, sash boxes and doors on the harbour side are rubbed back to sound paint, soft wood cut out, bare wood primed and the coats rebuilt so the joints are sealed. Much of the old town is in a conservation area and some buildings are listed, so a change of colour on a prominent frontage is worth checking with Cornwall Council before we start, and we will say when we think it needs it.
The window is short. Late spring to early autumn is the right time to paint outside on this coast, but that is also when Downalong is impossible to reach, so the seafront cottages are done in the settled weeks before Easter or in the autumn once the crowds have gone, and the houses up the hill fill the summer.
Upalong: the houses on the hill and the work inside them
Along the Stennack, up through the Belyars and out towards Tregenna and Carbis Bay are the Victorian and Edwardian terraces and villas, then the twentieth-century semis, bungalows and flats that climb the slope behind them. These are houses people live in all year, with a fair share of second homes and lets among them. Most have somewhere to put a van, a luxury by St Ives standards, and the exteriors are a more ordinary job: render and dash on the semis, bays, sashes and bargeboards on the older terraces, and the view side of the house taking the weather from the first floor up.
Inside, the terraces are solid-walled with plaster that is rarely flat, deep skirtings and picture rails, and paper that has been painted over more than once. Stripping it, filling and lining the walls, then sorting the woodwork is where the time goes. In the newer houses and flats it is the usual run: a hall and stairs worn by sandy feet, a kitchen left with bare plaster, a neutral repaint between tenants. For lets and second homes the specification is kept simple and durable, a washable emulsion and a satin on the woodwork, so a touch-up in March matches what went on in November.
The galleries, cafes, shops and guest houses want the same thing the lets do: the work done in the quiet weeks, customer-facing rooms first, and the plan made backwards from the day they reopen.
Colour and the light
St Ives has been a painters' town in the other sense for well over a century, and the reason is the light off the sea on three sides. It flattens a colour that looked warm in the tin and makes a pale grey read blue by mid-afternoon. Before you commit a whole cottage to one white, try it. The colour visualiser on this site lets you compare colours on a wall side by side, and we will paint a patch on the actual wall and leave it a day so you can see it morning and evening.