Owners’ Stories: Making ‘Luna’ Shine for Holiday Letting

In our latest blog series, we speak with our holiday homeowners to explore the process of getting their properties ‘holiday let-ready’. Including everything from seaside cottages to cosy homes in the country, let these stories inform your own holiday home journey – whether you’re an owner seeking inspiration, or a guest looking for a deeper context to your next holiday home visit.

Long-time Londoners, Adam and his family bought a bungalow at Camber in 2016, living with the property from a distance as they chartered its future course. Their London lives continued – with this salty bolthole on the side – so they could remain removed during the renovations, yet love it from afar. It was their escape project: a distraction that didn’t have to dominate their everyday lives.

Over around eight years, the design, rebuilding, and renovation of Luna rubbed up against their professional lives, but now it’s ready to open its doors to others to find their own Sussex retreat for a weekend or so.

We asked Adam if, given the long trajectory of the work, and as a first-time owner of a holiday let, whether he was looking forward to holiday letting and how he’d found the process of setting up the business from scratch.

1. What’s the story behind Luna? How did the renovations work?

“We bought Luna in 2016 and lived with it for several years before we decided what we should do. Luna has always been intended to exist both as a warm family space and a calm beach house retreat.

“A good friend and architect, Barbara Fassoni, built a first proposal model in late 2017 after lengthy discussions and the house has ended up pretty faithful to that first model, although finishes and detailing evolved through the course of the build. She was originally confused that we wanted to retain the appearance of the house from the outside. It’s one of only a few on the lane which from the front retains the original footprint. For us, what appealed was that it looked like the kind of house a child would draw, and we hoped to retain that charm.”

2. How did you choose your build team?

We wanted to work with a local builder who understood the environment and its unique characteristics. I had spoken with many over a two-year period – often when I saw them working on nearby houses – until I met Timon Cooke one day, who was finishing work on nearby Lark Rise. He was at once engaging and we both felt we could work well together. That relationship is so important, and it made the whole process an enjoyable one, rather than a battle.

3. Having spent time living in it, how did your observations about the house reflect your choices when it came to renovating?

Winters can be brutal in Camber, and houses need to be built to respond to all weathers, salt, and the sand, which gets in through every door, window, and even escutcheons. We soon recognised the need for a single smooth floor surface we could sweep through easily, and for an efficient way of insulating and heating the space. Good environmental credentials were important to us, and so a lot of research was done around heat pumps and combining some solar to act as a top-up. The resulting heat is ambient rather than localised, and we can control the temperature remotely, which means we – and our guests — can arrive at an already warm house.

4. Were there any design ideas you incorporated?

Entering the house from the side return meant arriving in a deceptively large space not visible from the front. Inside, clever interventions have been used to break up the ground floor space and create separate zones rather than rooms; an entirely open-plan space seemed too obvious. What results is a calm, warm space with lots of light, and the sun moves from back of the house to front during the day, so the fall of light is constantly changing. The statement orange wall was a brave and playful move, but the space benefits from a shot of intense colour.

The plan was always to make gentle references to its 1930s origins whilst creating a modern, versatile space. We achieved this with the windows and doors, lighting, the flycatcher shades on the wall (which would normally have hung on chains from the ceiling) and bathroom cabinets which we’d stored in a loft for 15 years. The kitchen worktop (and the front step) was remodelled from a snooker table slate retrieved from the apartments in Admiralty House, where Winston Churchill (twice) lived.

5. And what about the garden? Especially at the beach – gardens are notoriously tricky.

With the garden, the intention was for a space that reflected the locality and would not be too demanding if we weren’t there. The irony wasn’t lost on us buying 12 tons of shingle with the beach at the end of the lane. We integrated industrial materials which were cheap and repurposed; manhole rings as planters and radius granite kerb stones to surround the fire pit. It will take time to establish, but the hope is to continue with indigenous planting like sea buckthorn, grasses and sea kale that belongs and not try to grow plants better suited to a townhouse.

Luna is one of Bloom Stays’ new homes for 2026, located close to the beach at Camber Sands. To find out more, visit our Luna property page.