Baker’s Folly / Lewinnick Cove House

Lewinnick Cove House is the cliffside home known as Baker’s Folly, on Newquay’s Pentire Headland. Its private sea pool later served an evacuated teaching college.

Lewinnick Cove House, better known as Baker’s Folly, stands below Lewinnick Lodge on the north side of Pentire Headland, west of Fistral Beach in Newquay.

Newquay Museum traces Frederick William Baker’s purchase to 1910 and describes an Italian-inspired villa made possible by cutting back the cliff. Its account says construction stopped during the First World War, resumed after 1926 and finished around 1927. Those dates remain attributed to the museum: the underlying newspaper reports have not been inspected for this edition.

A second house and connecting tunnel remained unrealised. During the Second World War, students from the evacuated Bergman Österberg college used the private pool. The building’s story therefore extends beyond an ambitious construction project to an inhabited home and a place of practical wartime education.