French and colonial style collide in this piece of vintage heaven – with gourmet food to match – near Whitstable

In a little over one hour I have exchanged east London for a Kent village, its main thoroughfare passing between medieval cottages that lean in as though whispering to one another across the street. Here’s the Linen Shed. A grey wooden house with lace panels at the windows, it looms above a steeply terraced front garden. Someone’s got a sense of humour – a metal letterbox says US Mail.

“It’s a bit of an upside-down house,” says Vickie Miles, taking me straight up a flight of wooden stairs to an airy room in which colonial and French style collide. Beneath a ceiling fan, trompe l’oeil garlanded panels have been painted on the walls in pale pastels. Bergère armchairs and a wooden sofa (“From Normandy, bought on eBay,” says Vickie) add to the colonial feel. At the far end is an open-plan kitchen. There are loads of doors off this room, the heart of the house.

Vickie’s husband Graham appears in an Indian shirt of dazzling whiteness. Tea? Outside? Coming up.

My room’s at the front – it has an emperor bed with snowy White Company linen and just enough retro touches. The flatscreen TV seems incongruous somehow, and I tend to think that bedroom cupboards should be completely empty (rather than full of stationery), but I covet the large glass jar that says Rose Victor Vaissier Paris on the front. The shower room (so French with its floor-to-ceiling white brick tiles) is next door, and opposite is a smaller double room. This has a separate bathroom (which involves walking through the sitting room) and there is a third bedroom downstairs.

Now I’m seated comfortably outside, on a wooden veranda, looking out at roses, lavender, hydrangeas and B&B cats Cecil and Mr Wilfred. Pink geraniums populate a small Victorian atrium, and a bird’s nest is tucked into a rusting enamel washstand. Vintage heaven? Oh, I think so. This is going to be my first night in a Nissen hut – for that is what this has evolved from, the remaining one of three. Graham and Vickie moved here three and a half years ago from London. They looked in Whitstable (seven miles away – it celebrates its oyster festival this week) but knew the minute they set foot here they had found their house. “We sat outside in the car and put an offer in,” says Graham. “Three minutes, it took.”

Vickie wants to know what I’d like for breakfast (I suspect because her list of specialities is extensive). Grilled vine tomatoes and Serrano ham. Rösti potato cake with fried eggs and smoked back bacon. Scotch pancakes with bacon and maple syrup. Creamed mushrooms on toasted brioche and, of course, full English. Everything comes from local farms, oh and she makes gourmet seafood and charcuterie picnics, or packs guests off to the beach with a single-ring burner and crab cakes.

The phone rings constantly with bookings, this evening and the next morning (when I have dragged myself out of the blissful bed). Vickie talks with the authority of a true foodie to each caller about local restaurants (there is exceptional choice here).

I tuck into potato rösti and eggs on the sunny veranda. “Would you like to borrow some sunglasses?” Vickie asks, returning with a secondhand pair by Vivienne Westwood (of course). Bread smells like bread ought, a little butter pat is decorated with lavender and tea comes in mismatched china. Oof, I’m stuffed. She reappears to whisk my plate away. Then she’s off again, to answer the phone and talk someone else through the local dining options.
• The Whitstable Oyster Festival (whitstableoysterfestival.com) runs from 23-29 July

sally.shalam@guardian.co.uk

Local treats

At the Whitstable Oyster Festival (today-29 July – website above) taste the local rock oysters and take your pick of the local produce at the EPICentre Food Fair – and then check out some of the festival’s many other activities. This year’s family events include a sea shore safari on Monday and on Thursday there’s the building of candle-lit “grotters” – mounds of sand covered in oyster shells. There’s also plenty of live music, including sea shanties at the Duke of Cumberland hotel on Monday.
Vickie Miles, owner of the Linen Shed

Have an unusual day out at nearby Brogdale Farm, Faversham, (brogdalecollections.co.uk), home to the National Fruit Collection with nearly 4,000 varieties of fruit. You can taste the apple varieties Henry VIII was partial to and the nuts Columbus carried to America. Watch out for the regular festivals and events held here throughout the year, including Plum Day on 14 August. VM

Top eats

We are so spoilt for serious gastro pubs and restaurants that it’s hard to name them all, but they include the Sportsman in Whitstable (thesportsmanseasalter.co.uk) – try their seared thornback ray with brown butter and cockles, £17.95 (book well in advance) – and Wheelers Oyster Bar seewhitstable.com), where you can taste native Whitstable oysters (£9 for six). At the Dove, Dargate, try roasted Seasalter Marsh lamb (£16.95, doveatdargate.co.uk). We also have two great pubs in the village, both serving great local food and ales: the Queens Head (thequeenshead-at-boughton.co.uk) – try their chips and ketchup, all homemade – and the White Horse Inn (whitehorsecanterbury.co.uk).VM

Favourite shops

Faversham has a wealth of antique, vintage and bric-a-brac shops and warehouses down on Standard Quay (standardquay.co.uk), where you’ll find wonderful pieces of French furniture in particular. Macknade Fine Foods (macknade.com) is also not to be missed – it has a fantastic grocer’s store in the heart of town on West Street, but also a vast food hall on Selling Road, with specialist coffees and teas, Kentish wine and beers, cheese, meats and fresh fruit and veg – all selected and sourced directly from the producer.
Kevin Dodd, director of Hercules Wines (herculeswines.co.uk)

This Devon beachfront beauty is the epitome of good taste – with clean lines, muted blues and greys, and a two-bath wetroom

Is it just that I haven’t noticed them or do we, an island nation, have virtually no hotels on the beach? I mean right on the beach – like in the Caribbean? It is only as I descend the hill to South Sands bay, passing one hotel on my right, that I realise mine, the only other one here, beside an old lifeboat house, really is beachfront.

This 24-room newly built boutique hotel opened last year. Everything about it looks glossy and expensive – from its website to the brochures – yet it has no star grading. It is one of the modern wave (inevitable pun) of hotels which thumb their noses at both the AA’s and Visit Britain’s star-rating schemes. Perhaps it can afford to, with such a position – not only is the hotel on a wonderful sandy bay but the population of the nearest town, Salcombe, swells from 2,000 in winter to almost 10 times that in summer.

Salcombe is to Devon what Rock is to Cornwall. It is no accident that this was where the first Jack Wills shop opened, in 1999. In summer a ferry takes passengers from South Sands to the pretty town, which hugs a harbour further up the Kingsbridge estuary.

I’m spiralling up a modern cantilevered staircase of wood and steel, then heading along a coconut matting-covered corridor to my sea-facing room with balcony. Clean lines, tasteful blues and greys, seascapes on the wall. Peachy beachy.

In the wetroom, Molton Brown lip balm, bath salts, even a washing line to string up wet bathing things. Two baths seems excessive, but since they are right in front of double windows this is clearly a room for show-offs. This room isn’t cheap, but there are smaller versions and, more affordable still, others on the landward side.

If I lean over my balcony I can see people coming in from their bucket-and-spade day, pulling on faded rugby shirts and deck shoes, settling on the hotel veranda for a snifter before putting the kids to bed or changing for dinner. I join the throng, first on the terrace and later in the bar, which serves as the sitting room but is, in truth, a corridor between reception and restaurant, then eat an early dinner, among families, couples and even a wedding party. Young, efficient staff in skinny jeans ferry home-cured salmon gravadlax with beetroot and pot-roasted venison.

“Ooh, let’s take one more photo for luck,” booms a voice from the next-door balcony as I study the night sky from the depths of my right-hand bath. I struggle to find a convenient power point for the kettle, and no amount of unplugging turns off a relentless blue light on the wall-mounted TV (so I drape the bedspread over it). Windows thrown open, I drift off, and wake to the shoosh of waves. Isn’t that what everyone wants on holiday?

Lots of kids and gallons of fruit juice at the breakfast buffet table, plus delicious spiced cake and honey on the comb, and people like me munching behind the newspaper.

South Sands is proof that “family friendly” need not mean “style bypass”. The only minus is its lack of a sitting room. Having turned its back (with no discernible detriment) on the rating system, though, couldn’t it, in a continued spirit of anarchy, take another risk or two? The occasional injection of character – perhaps less predictable paintings in the rooms? – to set against a ubiquitous backdrop of pale, measured perfection.

sally.shalam@guardian.co.uk