The most important house in the world for me is my parent's holiday home on the Isle of Wight. It's on the coastal road in the town of Seaview and it’s where my whole family - my wife and four children, my three sisters and their children, plus my parents - congregate in August each year. I sometimes have to miss out because of my work on albums and touring with Sting, and if I do, I physically ache to be back with them.

My father bought this house in 1990 in ludicrous circumstances. My mother was in hospital, badly injured from falling off a ladder. Dad was supposed to buy a ground-floor apartment with flat surfaces for her wheelchair. Instead, he fell in love with this three-storey, rambling, late-Victorian villa, which he purchased instead. Quite accidentally, he's made a shrewd investment - it cost £125,000 and it's probably worth more than £400,000 now.

It's easy to see what attracted Dad to the house. It's only 50 yards from the high-tide mark — the sea spray hits the windows. This is great for him because he swims every week. When he's at home in Putney, London, he swims in the Serpentine lake, Hyde Park, all year round, despite being 73.

The house was sold with some of its furniture and the whole family has added bits and pieces. There are gold discs for Sting's albums that it would appear conceited to hang in my flat in Battersea, old watercolours, a lobster basket from Boston, a mirror from Argentina, a garden statue we found washed up on the beach, and hundreds of seashells.

The best August here was undoubtedly 2001. I had just returned from touring and I told my son, then 16, to bring some friends to join us. But I didn’t mean 12 of them. Anyway, we came to Seaview and found my sister's daughter had done exactly the same. We had 27 teenagers under one roof. When you have that many kids together you can't be too authoritarian. Eventually, we set just two rules. First, no sex for unmarried people aged under 40.

Second, you must always return the scissors. It worked. The adults slept on the first floor and the top storey was completely out of bounds to us. Every night, we barbecued and the kids simply organised everything.

Seaview is holiday heaven for teenagers. Only about 10% of houses are owned by locals and the rest are holiday homes for families who meet up every year. Kids wander into one another's houses, nobody locks front doors - it's very safe. At night, they'll hang out until two or three in the morning on "the wall" in front of Seaview Yacht Club.

If I can't get here in August, then I come in the winter. As soon as I get off the ferry I feel safe. It's only a few hours from London, but I get the sense of being out of reach. The weeks before Christmas are good, when everything's closed down and there's this sense of expectancy. I came here last December with my wife, Fanny, who is French. It was incredibly peaceful - I worked on my current album, Shapes, we took long beach walks and spent lazy lunchtimes in the pub.

It's curious that a place can mean so much when it holds so little material value. I have spent time in Sting's house in Malibu and visited Franco Zeffirelli at his house in Italy. But it's hard to feel comfortable in a place where everything you touch is worth a small fortune.

This scruffy beach house at Seaview is where I feel most comfortable, yet there's nothing here of any value at all - except memories.

Dominic Miller has been Sting’s guitarist for 14 years. His album, Shapes, is released by Inversion Records at £13.99. Interview by Fred Redwood