Coppercoin

The front of the house faces the sea. Its French doors open south onto a gravel garden of roses and Verbena bonariensis, and past the rooftops below sits the English Channel, grey-blue to the horizon. Coppercoin is a white two-bedroom bungalow at Fairlight Cove, a village on the cliffs between Hastings and Pett Level in East Sussex.

Fairlight Cove is young for a Sussex village. Its first houses went up about a century ago on the high ground east of Hastings, and the lanes still carry names like Channel Way. Up the road is an entrance to Hastings Country Park, 345 hectares of sandstone cliff, gorse and gill woodland that run west to the town, most of it inside the Hastings Cliffs to Pett Beach Site of Special Scientific Interest. The path through Fairlight Glen drops to Covehurst Bay, where William Holman Hunt spent the autumn of 1852 painting the cliffs and the sheep at Lovers' Seat for Our English Coasts, the picture that hangs in Tate Britain.

The village has a bar and a coffee shop at The Cove, a farm shop and Stonelynk Organics for food, and Hastings Old Town to the west for the galleries and the net huts. Rye is to the east. Trains from Hastings reach London St Pancras and Victoria. In September the verbena stands taller than the fence and the orchard by the drive is in apple.