With a growing family to consider Naomi and Jimmy Garcia wanted to upsize from their three-bedroom London flat.
As inveterate south Londoners they also didn’t want to move far from Tooting and made an offer on a house down the road in Streatham.
Covid-19 was in full swing and one day the couple were talking about the move. “We said, why don’t we just take a look at what’s on offer in Brighton and Hove,” says Jimmy. “It was a real wild card option.”
But after going down to East Sussex to look at some properties Naomi, 36, and Jimmy, 37, fell for a fixer upper close to Hove Station and decided to play the joker. “It was impulsive, but we are quite impulsive people,” says Jimmy.
And his CV backs up this statement. After university Jimmy moved to London planning to earn his fortune as a City broker, but quickly realised he wasn’t up for a life selling stocks and securities. “I absolutely hated it,” he says.
Jimmy quit his job within 18 months. Always interested in cooking he had, in the meanwhile, been running small supper clubs from his shared flat, but once he was jobless he headed out to Courchevel, France, with a couple of friends and set up a chalet company.
On his return to London he started working on supper clubs again. When his flatmates started to complain – “We can’t have our living room as a restaurant with strangers dancing on the table” – Jimmy started to look around for temporary venues and Jimmy Garcia Catering (jimmygarciacatering.com) was born, catering to a mix of private events and pop ups.
Because their Hove house needed a top to bottom refurb Jimmy and Naomi moved first into a rented property in Balham while waiting for the work to be carried out.
Finally, in 2022 the couple plus their son Jack, now four, moved south. Their daughter, GG, is now aged two.
The family had sold their Tooting flat for £635,000 but their five-bedroom house in Hove, despite its neglected state, cost £841,000.
Add in another £250,000 on renovations, including a side return extension and loft conversion, and their total investment in their new home is around £1.1m.
However Jimmy believes it has been a good investment — their neighbours recently sold their house for almost £1.4m. “It is like a savings account really,” says Jimmy.
Jimmy still returns to London four to five days per week for work – the train from Hove to his office near Clapham Junction takes him just over an hour – and he enjoys having the separation between work and home life.
He and Naomi, who also works for the business, have got fully into the seaside family swing, even buying themselves a beach hut.
They also spend time tending the vegetable patch at the end of their garden and caring for chickens.
“We have made a really good group of friends in Hove, which I think is because it is full of like minded people like us who want to keep going with their London careers, but also want to give their family the quality of life you get down here,” he says.
