Take me to St Ives
IN 1939, ahead of the expected London Blitz, the writer and painter Adrian Stokes sent his young wife out from Hampstead to seek a coastal retreat for themselves and their artist lodgers. Margaret Mellis searched the Norfolk and Suffolk shorelines as directed, but in vain. Instead, she charted her own course and eventually found the perfect place in Cornwall: a long stone house called Little Parc Owles, above Carbis Bay and next to St Ives.
Once everything was ready, her spouse and lodgers, Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth —plus triplets, nanny and cook—arrived to focus on stellar careers. As Mellis later recalled: ‘The problem was that I
