Staycation holiday homes in the UK: low-energy homes, coastal escapes and self-catering resorts in Devon and Cornwall

Staycations are here to stay — at least while coronavirus casts its dark shadow, shutting airports and whole countries, making booking flights a risky game.

Many families have already embraced UK coastal resorts. If the British seaside is on your radar and you want to reduce your carbon footprint, this could be your chance to buy an attractive and sustainable new holiday home in an area of outstanding beauty in the West Country.

Recently awarded Best Sustainable Residential Development in the UK, Seaton Beach has eight handsome, contemporary and light-filled apartments on the seafront.

Seaton is a fishing harbour and pleasant little town in East Devon, part of the Jurassic Coast Unesco World Heritage Site between Lyme Regis and Sidmouth.

The four-floor Seaton Beach building is one of around 300 built in the UK over the past 15 years that conform to Passivhaus standards, a voluntary code for energy efficiency. Design includes triple-glazed windows and doors by UK company Norrsken, solar panels, silently circulated fresh air and extra insulation.

The low-energy homes demonstrate good savings on running costs for owners and a substantially reduced ecological footprint.

Five of the eight two- and three-bedroom apartments at Seaton Beach are sold, with the remaining three priced from £524,000.

Across on the North Devon coast, four minutes from the exceptionally beautiful sandy beach at Woolacombe, Byron Woolacombe is a development of 57 apartments with interesting investment potential.

The completed two-, three- and four-bedroom homes are well designed with Amtico flooring, quartz stone worktops in the kitchens and crisp coastal interiors. All have balconies or terraces with sea or garden views.

Communal facilities include a good restaurant overseen by chef Graham Brundle who grew up locally and has worked for The Ritz hotel, the King of Jordan and Richard Branson. There is also an indoor pool, gym, games room and secure parking.

An on-site team will deal with day to day management and provide hotel-style services, stash surf boards away for owners and handle rentals.

Prices start from £375,000.

Buyers of furnished holiday lets can claim capital allowances on all the furnishings and fittings and Byron believe this could be as much as 27 per cent of the total purchase price, making rental profits tax-free for up to five years.

Cornwall is predicted to be the biggest beneficiary of any staycation frenzy, helped by its established tourism market and its astonishingly beautiful 422-mile coastline, which takes in the surfing beaches of the north coast and the sailing bays and coves along the south.

Aria Resorts, which has 14 UK holiday resorts from Scotland to the Isle of Wight, has invested more than £100 million in Cornwall, much of it at Retallack Resort & Spa eight miles from Padstow.

Cornwall lovers say that even the food has improved hugely in the county in recent years and TV chef Rick Stein’s Padstow, or “Padstein”, is a good place to test that theory.

However, this is a self-catering holiday resort, for those yet to be convinced. It has good family-friendly facilities and offers activities that include a spa, health club, indoor pool, tennis and a wide choice of water sports with an aqua park and wake boarding.

Two-, three- and four-bedroom lodges are energy-efficient modular homes on 999-year leases priced from £275,000.

They are built to Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors standard and fully mortgageable.

Owners can choose to keep them for their own personal use or hand them over to Aria to manage rentals with a fixed return of seven per cent.