The house
Alba Bay Cove holds twenty-four rooms in a rebuilt harbour house, a kitchen that seats forty, and one stretch of water that belongs to nobody in particular.
Above the old harbour
The building was a salt store, then a ferry office, then nothing at all for eleven years. We took it on in the middle of a wet winter and spent the first four months carrying rubble down the hill by hand. The walls are the original stone, a metre thick at the base, which is why the rooms hold their cool right through August. Everything else is new and deliberately plain: lime plaster, oak, linen, terracotta laid by two brothers from the village who argued about the pattern for a week.
A morning built around the water
Breakfast runs late on purpose. The gate to the sea steps opens at six for anyone who swims early, and the coffee is out before that. Nothing here needs booking except dinner and the treatment room.
Written up in
A slower way
by the sea
Twenty-four rooms, two cooks, one pool and a gate to the water that we keep unlocked.
We are not trying to be a resort. There is no lobby music, no welcome drink, no folder of laminated activities. What we do have is a house that has stood above this harbour for a hundred and forty years, staff who mostly grew up within a kilometre of it, and a kitchen that buys from four boats and three farms. Guests tend to arrive with a plan and lose it by the second morning. That is the intended effect.
The season runs from the end of March to the first week of November. In spring the water is cold and the hills are loud with birds. July and August belong to families and the pool is busy until eight. September is the month we keep for ourselves, when the sea is warmest, the harbour is quiet and the kitchen gets ambitious again. We close through winter, repair what the salt has taken, and open the shutters in the last week of March.
Alba Bay Cove
Stay offers
Two things we keep open all season, both arranged at the desk when you book a room.
