Artist Rob Shaw was hands on in turning his Yorkshire coast home into a sought after holiday let

“I thought I knew what to expect,” says Rob, “but it was much harder than I thought. Nothing was easy or straight forward.”

When he moved back to Staithes in 2009 he was giving up a 10-year career in architecture and design to follow his dream of becoming a full time professional artist. Drawn to the rugged North Yorkshire coastline, he rented the then two-bedroom mid-terrace cottage and turned the large, beamed attic into a painting studio.

Five years later he bought the cottage and continued to live and work from the white-washed property. “It was perfect for a single guy,” he says. “It was damp and cold and desperately needed modernising, but it worked for me and I was able to sell enough paintings through the Staithes Gallery to earn a reasonable living.”

Then in 2019 Rob met and married Charlie, a director of TotemTipi, and moved into her house near Richmond with her three children. “I didn’t want to sell the house in Staithes,” says Rob. “I have a daughter and it’s as much her home as mine. We also wanted to come back to Staithes whenever we liked.

“I still come here to paint and it’s great for family weekends away and so we decided to run it as an AirBnB and let it earn its keep in between times.”

The only way to achieve this, however, was to give the property the overhaul it desperately needed.

Knowing it would be almost impossible to get trades people to take on the task, Rob used his own building experience to take on the project himself, with the help of a close friend from the village. They started in the basement kitchen and worked their way up through the property, but it was the basement which proved the biggest challenge.

“We knew the only way to do it right was take it back to a shell,” says Rob. “We took up the lino floor and all the wood panelling on the walls to find black mould everywhere. It was a mess.”

Rob faced a number of issues which were peculiar to the village, not least the sea salt which is highly corrosive and causes damage to the buildings, and the solid rock on which this former fishing village is built.

The rock is so hard that pipes and cables can’t be fed through it, so even though Rob dug out the kitchen floor with a pickaxe as deep as he could go to gain maximum head height, he still had to feed the pipes between the original basement wall and a new stud wall.

To add to the challenges there is no vehicular access to the cottage, so all the rubble from the kitchen had to be hand lifted through the small window and carried to skips on the staithe – an area where the local fishing boats land.

The basement kitchen had to be as watertight as possible so it was lined out with several layers of Wykamol membrane and Febtank waterproof paint, which is a high performance tanking slurry for masonry and concrete.

“It’s a much better system than the layers of carrier bags which we discovered under the concrete floor,” says Rob. “In a place like this you will never stop moisture seeping through the walls, but you can do a lot to prevent it becoming a problem.”

With the room fully tanked out, Rob mixed concrete for the floor with the help of two close builder friends in the village, and poured it down a shute fed through the window, ready for levelling. The walls were skimmed and the original beams stripped, treated and painted.

“We unearthed all kinds of things which pointed to the cottage’s history – like an old stone fish sink where the day’s catch would have been prepared and old stone box which I think had something to do with drainage,” said Rob.

With the kitchen finished, Rob moved to the ground floor sitting room. It was emptied of furniture, replastered in parts, the beams and floorboards sanded and an old, inefficient back boiler behind the historic range was replaced. As he continued to work up through the cottage, Rob replastered a wall in the main bedroom and rehung the windows.

“The cottage, named The Curious Crab, is in a conservation area and the original windows were shaped with axes and fitted with hand blown glass,” said Rob. “We couldn’t take them out so we repaired and rehung them in situ.”

The old bathroom was refitted and the attic, which he had been using as a studio, was boarded out and insulated ready for decoration and furnishing, finally bringing the year-long renovation project to an end.

"It was a lot more challenging than I expected it to be,” said Rob. “I had to do most of the work myself because no-one else would do it. Fortunately a friend in the village helped out and without him we would have been stuck.

“I did wonder what we’d taken on, but we’ve saved a lot of money doing the work ourselves and the whole renovation has cost about £25,000. Not bad considering it has given the cottage a whole new lease of life.”

*www.robshawart.co.uk; The Curious Crab: www.holidaycottages.co.uk

Wilf Noble building supplies ltd, Whitby 01947 820310 www.wildnoblebuildingsupplies.co.uk; CEF electrical , whitby: 01723 366344 www.cef.co.uk; Green and Son building services, Lingdale: 01287 650314 www.greenandson.co.uk.; Topps Tiles: www.toppstiles.co.uk; MKM whitby www.mkm.com; Calverts carpets: www.calverts-carpets.com; Yorkshire Timber: 01422 350073 www.yorkshiretimbermerchants.co.uk; Purple skip hire, www.purpleskiphire.co.uk; Wolseley plumbing supplies, Whitby, www.wolseley.co.uk; Rodbers of Richmond building suppliers, www.rodbers.com;Jewson www.jewson.co.uk; Howdens Whitby ( kitchen supplier) www.howdens.com; Seaside Electrics 07967 767630; Wykamol Baseline waterproof membrane: www.wykamol.com; www.TotemTipi.co.uk