Trevance Head

Trevance Head is the first land the Atlantic meets for two hundred miles, and the houses built on it are shaped by that fact more than by any brief we have written. The headland runs roughly north to south, which gives its western edge an unbroken evening light from March until October, and its eastern slope a sheltered, almost inland calm.

The land was quarried for granite until 1931. What that left behind is a series of flat, level shelves cut into the hillside — the reason the head can carry substantial houses without terracing, and the reason the local stone in every wall here matches the ground it stands on.

It is not a soft place. Winter storms come in from the south-west and the road to the point is closed perhaps three days a year. Buyers who fall for Trevance in July should walk it again in January before they commit; the ones who still want it tend to stay for decades.