Bijoux Beachhouse Dreams

Published on 10 July 2025
Featured by Wilsons

I’ve never really understood living in Jersey and not being able to see the sea. The country parishes might as well be Milton Keynes to me, unless they have some distant glint of the ocean. Perhaps it’s because I grew up without any nearby golden sand, miles from anything other than a grubby, industrial coastline on the other side of my hometown in South Wales. When older friends started to drive, the first place we went was the Gower Peninsula—Wales’s rugged, sandy surf spot. Imagine several St Ouen’s Bays, all wrapped around a cliffy headland. It was Point Break perfection, and the place I first fell in love with the idea of living next to the sea. I’m not ashamed to admit that my choice of university was heavily swayed by its proximity to a sandy beach. When I moved to Jersey five years later, a beachside house was still a faraway dream. The first three years were spent in a flat in town with my girlfriend. It was a little dark, and the view was of other flats. When we started looking for somewhere bigger to buy together, it was realistically a two-bedroom flat we were after. We got ‘blackballed’ for being too young by a bunch of pensioners who formed the committee of a block behind the Merton. We looked at a lot of dowdy doer-uppers. But then we struck gold. 2 Rosedale Bungalows, as it was then known, was a green, pebble-dashed little cottage on the seafront at Beaumont. It had just come onto the market, and a very nice agent called John Crespel showed us around. The owner lived in St Lawrence and used it at the weekends. A second house? A holiday home down the road from your ‘other’ house? As a 20-something looking for their first home, I found that concept mind-blowing. The owner had become too old to make any meaningful use of it. It was a little tired, but I was in love. I stood at the lounge window, looked across the cycle track to the crashing waves of St Aubin’s Bay beyond, and knew we had to have it. Thanks to an understanding seller, a good agent, and a bit of good timing, it wasn’t long before we had the keys and a renovation mission ahead of us. We took up all the carpets, took down the heavy curtains, nets and chandeliers, and set about making it our dream beach house. We gave it a new roof, with new slates for the pitch and new fibreglass for the flat bits. Inside, we vaulted the roof to give the dining area and kitchen we’d created a sense of space. We rewired, replumbed, and gave the new bathroom some light with a skylight. We stripped back all the floors to be more in keeping with the goal of our future dog having less carpet to destroy with sandy paws. We named it Midbeach. I always hate it when you see something described as 2/3 bedroom—as surely, it’s one or the other. In the case of Midbeach, we opened up the living space into an L shape of kitchen, dining, and lounge, and there are three other rooms. It’s on the parish rates as two-bedroom, but there’s a spare. A room off the lounge with a sea view (bottom left in the images above) was our bedroom, most convenient for us when stumbling to the sofa to sleep. The larger room we used as an office before switching to that as the bedroom when our daughter was born. There’s also the former kitchen at the back of the house where we had a sofa bed, and it’s big enough to be a spare room for whatever use is required. Living on the cycle track in our 20s was gold. Working from home, eating from the Gunsite, and discovering that living on the cycle track makes you a social epicentre. We loved that people would pop in as they passed, and evenings in our garden spilled out onto the beach. Barbecues with a sea view and evening swims were par for the course. The location is conveniently Westie, with a drive to the Five Mile Road a quick option, but it’s also an easy commute to the big smoke of St Helier. Google Maps will tell you it’s 13 minutes by bike to town, but you can do it in six. And it’s less than five to get to St Aubin if you’re pedalling hard, or power-assisted. An e-bike is the logical transport option for beachside living, but the property does have a rented space in the Perquage car park, three doors down. Skateboarding back and forth to my car was always a joy. When we had our daughter and started thinking about a family, we realised how much ‘stuff’ was going to be involved and decided that we might need somewhere bigger as a nest. We’d already had plans passed to create a vaulted living space onto the garden, but it was time to move on. It was reluctant, and my caveat was that we would keep Midbeach. We wrangled, borrowed, and begged, and decamped to town for 13 years. I made a promise we would go back to the beach one day. This year, an opportunity presented itself to move back to Beaumont into a house big enough for the needs of a two-gen future. Our change in circumstances means that Midbeach, as much as I love it, is now in our past and not our future, and it’s time to let someone else love the lifestyle we enjoyed, and are now enjoying again. We’ve painted it, replaced some windows, had a new bathroom fitted, and re-decked the garden. It’s got a new gate and is ready for someone new. It’s rustic, sandy, beach living. It would suit downsizers with a dog who only want to walk ten feet to the beach, or young professionals who wants a beachfront house instead of a flat in town with a hefty service charge. I’m biased obviously, having lived there, loved it there, and written this myself, but I think it’s wonderful. If you want to check out the view or just be nosy, give the agent a call.

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