Kate Winslet's Cornish retreat

If you like sun, sea and fresh air, Cornwall is a great place for a holiday. With its mild climate, dramatic coastline and great surfing beaches, it can seem like paradise. But what is it like as a place to live?

Film star Kate Winslet, who lives in Cornwall, thinks it is a good place to relax and get away from it all. Her first house in Cornwall, where she lived for two years, was near St Ives. The house, which was Japanese-style and built on stilts, was quite remote. To get to it, you had to walk across a ten metre bridge. 'I like living apart from the rest of the world,' says Kate.

Kate now has a house on the north Cornish coast just outside Tintagel. It's on top of a cliff with dramatic views of the Atlantic Ocean. The village where she does her shopping has only a few shops. 'That's fine,' says Kate. 'I didn't come here to go shopping.'

For some people, this may seem a boring sort of life. But Kate disagrees. 'I'm never bored here in Cornwall. Yesterday my friends and I went to see the Eden Project. It's a group of huge, space age "biodomes", where flowers and trees from all over the world grow in different climate zones. It's fascinating. Where else can you see that?'

However, for Kate, the main attraction of Cornwall is the scenery. 'A view which always excites me is the coastline round Tintagel,' says Kate. 'I love the rocks and the empty beaches and hays. It's so wild. It's my idea of paradise.'

An English Home

The English are obsessed with privacy. That is why a detached house, preferably surrounded by a large garden, is considered to be the most desirable type of accommodation. If it is a country house, it is also a status symbol. Terraced houses are very common in the suburbs; although they are frequently cramped with tiny rooms, they seem to give an illusion of privacy and are therefore more popular than flats. Blocks of flats in housing estates are commonly associated with low-rent housing for the poorest; infested with crime and vandalism, they are often dangerous places to live.

Another feature of home which English people value very much is cosiness. They try to make their houses cosy by furnishing them with old items of furniture and by having an open fire. If they cannot have a real fire, they will at least have some gas flames on artificial coals in the fireplace; still the hearth is considered to be the symbol of family warmth and security.

Cosiness and privacy are also important in the design of an English home. The areas where strangers are entertained, like the living room and the dining room, are carefully separated from the private area of the family, e.g. the bedrooms. The living room, sometimes called the lounge or the sitting room, is taken for granted, so that a two-bedroom flat actually consists of three rooms.