The Cornish home of the fashion entrepreneur Sotiris Xeni and his partner Nicola Mehaffey is a museum of collecting. Its location, outside Newlyn on the west Cornwall coast, is also a retreat into a bygone past. “It has retained that lovely feeling of old England,” says Xeni, who has spent summers diving along the region’s shorelines since adolescence. “You still see kids playing out on the street.”
Cornish Fisherman, a sculpture by Christopher Marvell, sits on a 19th-century English military chest © Jenna Foxton
Set on a sleepy back street, the light-filled 2,876sq ft former minister’s house sits on a handsome historic row. It was built in the 1840s, with later additions, and its interior is blissfully secluded from the procession of day-trippers to St Michael’s Mount, which is perched dramatically on the distant horizon. As they walk along the cobblestones towards the island fortress, they embody emmets – the archaic local term for tourists, meaning ants. Xeni and Mehaffey’s three-storey, four-bedroom home was first seen by the couple in 2021 while they were out to lunch with friends. Xeni knocked on the door, was granted a tour and made an offer on the spot. It’s an intuitive decision-making that has always been a hallmark of his business acumen. He was raised on a council estate in Camden, north London, largely by his Cypriot maternal grandmother, known as “yiayiá” (“grandma”). At 17, he joined the family’s clothing manufacturing firm, slowly pivoting the business into profit once again. In 2015, he co-founded the hugely successful womenswear label Nobody’s Child together with his brother Andrew.
