Chicago House

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Standing five storeys high above the harbour in Port Isaac, Chicago House is a double house. Its slate-built lower storeys date from the seventeenth or eighteenth century, and two more of clapboard with bright, high ceilinged rooms under an airy attic were added over them early in the nineteenth century. Its unusual name and colonial-style architecture come from the local man who returned to build it after making his fortune in America, and a much older flagged basement room is said to have been used to dry and mend fishing nets. The downstairs 'cottage' can provide semi self-contained accommodation for guests or teenagers, and there are front doors on three different levels, but the glory of this house is its multiplicity of views out over a maze of alleys and roof tops to the harbour and sea beyond.

Chicago House is five storeys high, much taller than the average fishermen’s cottages which surround it, so that its living rooms and bedrooms in the two upper storeys and attic command wide views over the roofs of neighbouring houses, across the village and its surrounding landscape.

Entry is from Rose Hill. The approach road, across a tiny front garden and through a pedimented front door on the short facade, but there are two further doors on each of the side elevations, one onto Dolphin Street and the other onto Back Lane. At the back of the house a glazed door leads onto a railed decking 'viewing platform' overlooking village and harbour and wooden steps down to a small back yard and washing line.

Accommodation on three floors plus attic :

Kitchen and adjoining Dining Room and Sitting Room on entrance floor, (ground floor)
6 Bedrooms and 2 Bathrooms arranged on floor above, and below, and attic.

Two bedrooms with double beds,
Two bedrooms with single beds,
Two bedrooms with four foot wide beds,
Two Bathrooms each with bath, basin and lavatory, one on each of the bedroom floors.

Utility room on lower ground floor.

Basement floor is not included in rental

Behind the front door is a small hallway giving onto the Kitchen, adjoining Dining Room and Sitting Room. There is a large kitchen table, Belling electric cooker, dishwasher and fridge freezer and a painted wooden highchair. The Sitting Room has a painted wooden floor with a large sea grass mat, two sofas, chairs, leather bean bags, an open fire and TV/DVD/Video, and a glazed door onto the railed viewing platform on which you can sunbathe or sit on fine evenings.

A narrow staircase from the hallway gives access down to the 'cottage' lower ground floor below with its own door onto the side alley, a slate flagged utility room incorporating boiler and drying rack, log store, small butler's sink and washing machine, a place to dump wellingtons, dog beds and bowls, wet suits and boards and outdoor gear.

On this floor there is also a simple bathroom with lino floor, bath, basin and lavatory. Next door are two very simple, small bedrooms, secluded from the rest of the house, one with a single and one with a narrow double bed. They have painted wooden floors, and windows looking out onto Dolphin Street and the next door house. These are the only bedrooms without good views, and they are usually occupied by children or teenagers.

On the lowest (basement) floor the large slate floored room, formerly a net loft, is usually kept locked as our private storage space.
Chicago House is our family holiday home, not a typical 'holiday let, ' and our prices reflect this, being set at several hundred pounds below those for houses of equivalent size in Port Isaac. All the rooms are simply furnished, with wooden floors, a few rugs, and a mixture of old and new furniture, a Habitat beech-block kitchen table, Welsh 'Tapestry' blankets for bedcovers, an Chesterfield sofa, Arts and Crafts movement chairs, Victorian iron bedsteads ( with new wooden slat bases and sprung mattresses), books, games, videos and ornaments. All the beds have feather duvets and pillows. There is also an old, collapsible wooden cot with a new 'Mothercare' mattress. Chicago House is neither luxurious nor uncomfortably spartan, but the rooms are light and airy and its situation is beautiful.

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