When she couldn’t find the perfect country farmhouse with sweeping views and scant neighbors, Plum Sykes invented one, complete with old-world charm and modern comfort—a story she recounted for Vogue’s November 2016 issue. As Sykes appears on Vogue’s The Run-Through podcast today in honor of her new book, Wives Like Us, take a look back at her bucolic Cotswolds home.
Lost a peacock? Call this number, read the sign outside an overgrown cottage close to home. My heart sank and soared in equal measure: I had lost a peacock—in fact I had lost three—so I was thrilled to know that one of them was safe. I also knew that peacocks are virtually impossible to catch.
Lost peacocks, missing sheep, late, lamented horses—all these are part of my daily life now. I have finally settled in the English countryside, full-time, forever, lock, stock, and family. My husband, Toby, and I and our daughters, Ursula, ten, and Tess, six, live on a remote sheep farm in the Cotswold Hills. It’s one of the prettiest parts of England. Our house perches on the edge of a bucolic valley, its pastures divided by ancient dry-stone walls and hawthorn hedges. There is not a building in sight.
Finding a spot this heavenly took years. Long-term weekenders, we’d been renting a cottage in Gloucestershire to balance our London lives, and dreamed of buying a pretty old farmhouse with incredible views, no road noise, and no neighbors. So did everyone else. Which is why we couldn’t find one. Then, one May weekend, we saw an ad for a farm five miles from our rental, more than 100 acres of land with a small house, barns, and stables. We weren’t looking for 100 acres and a small house; we were looking for a decent-size house and 20 acres. But we decided to check it out.
The farm was accessed by a stony track, with cow parsley growing high on either side. The fields below, dotted with sheep, looked like a postcard from another time.
“We’ve got to live here!” I said to my husband. I was having a Tess of the d’Urbervilles moment.
Toby was as smitten as I. The only issue was that the old farm cottage was damp, cramped, and subsiding. The owner hadn’t touched it for years. (His polo ponies, on the other hand, were living in luxury in the stables out in the yard.)
“It’s the perfect spot to build a house,” announced the realtor.
The idea horrified me. I didn’t have a grand design in me. And, in any case, I wanted to live in an old house, not a new one. The truth was, I was a bit of an old-house snob: Like many English people, I have always attached a great deal of romance and nostalgia to ancient buildings. A childhood spent in a medieval farmhouse, combined with an addiction to such novels as Wuthering Heights, Brideshead Revisited, and Rebecca, had given me the warped view that only old dwellings had atmosphere.
But that day, looking at the run-down little farmhouse and its extraordinary location, we realized that if we wanted to live somewhere this beautiful, it wasn’t going to be a simple case of moving into a ready-made home. By the end of September, the property was ours. We had taken a huge gamble and bought the derelict farm (for, once the Tess-tinted glasses had defogged, that was what we now understood it was, complete with thousands of thistles and nettles in those pretty fields). We prayed that we would get planning permission.
Right away, I got started on my mood boards, filling scrapbook after scrapbook with pictures of Georgian rectories and cottage gardens. When we began designing the house with our architect, the brief soon became the not-very-imaginative “fake old Cotswold farmhouse.” We wanted the feeling of a home that had been around for a few centuries, combined with the functionality of a brand-new building. We would keep the old farm cottage, turning it into a boot room, nursery, and utility area, and add a new front.
Over many months, the architect proposed various designs, but none were quite right. In the end, Toby and I took him to Abbey Farm in the famously beautiful Slad Valley, immortalized by Laurie Lee in his book Cider with Rosie. It has a charming stone facade—a Jacobean central block and porch, a Georgian wing at one end, and a converted barn at the other. The house is only one room deep, cottage-size, but it has wonderful proportions. It became our chief inspiration.
I won’t bore you with too many details about the part that happens between designing a house and decorating it; two exhausting years were spent contemplating concrete breeze blocks, roof tiles, stone samples, double glazing, plumbing, and drainage. Disasters befell us, as they do all self-builders: Our worst moment was when, after we got the roof on and the house watertight, a huge rainstorm battered it only to reveal that every stone window leaked bucketfuls of water. In tears, I asked the architect to come up with a solution to fix them. He quit the project. The builder was fired.
So there we were, halfway through a two-year build with no architect and no builder. We had a leaky shell and a concrete-block interior.
But you never know what good can come out of a crisis. A few weeks earlier I had been introduced to a talented architectural designer named Tristan Salazar. Tristan had worked for fifteen years for the famous decorator Robert Kime, whose work conjures up the essence of the bohemian English country house for clients ranging from pop stars to Prince Charles. Tristan, along with a miraculously available team from Robert Kime, rescued our project.
I had the naive idea that you build a house and then decorate it. But inside our beautiful stone-clad construction with wonderful gables, Gothic windows, and old-fashioned Cotswold tiles, the rooms were little more than boxes. Tristan had to design every door frame, windowsill, cornice, and even the look of the plastering (soft and slightly uneven so it would be in keeping with the “period” of the house).
When it finally came to decorating, we wanted our home to feel relaxed but glamorous. It was a farmhouse, so it had to be practical, but we also planned to entertain and have weekend guests to stay in comfort. Hand-painted wallpapers and silk carpets were out; squashy sofas, cozy sitting rooms, oak floors, large fireplaces, and excellent water pressure were in.
The biggest room in the house is the dining room, laid with wide oak floorboards. We managed to get a local stonemason to copy an exquisite seventeenth-century fireplace from a friend’s house. Tristan had an original piece of late-sixteenth-century cornice—chunky entwined fruits and leaves—which we used as the model for our own. He created a barely there pale-blue wash for the walls. The huge windows were framed with faded pink linen curtains, edged with vintage lace I’d found in a shop on London’s Portobello Road.
When we’re not entertaining, Tess uses the room for Rollerblading practice and Ursula tinkles away at her scales on the 100-year-old Steinway piano my grandmother gave me when I was sixteen. On those long, dark evenings that start at four in the afternoon in the English winter, I’ll set the girls’ tea on a tiny table right in front of the huge fireplace as a treat when they get home from school.
Many of our decorating ideas were borrowed. A friend has a country drawing room wall covered in William Morris’s classic “Willow Boughs” wallpaper (designed in 1887, it still looks fresh). After many happy visits there, we planned to use it ourselves, and it became the basis for a design by Tristan for an Arts and Crafts-inspired drawing room, using reclaimed carved wooden pilasters and rustic oak beams. The pale pink silk velvet curtains add a luxurious, slightly Old Hollywood touch, and the nineteenth-century Ziegler rug, a gift from my mother-in-law, adds just the right dose of English chic. I scoured local auction houses and sales for four-poster beds and vintage linens. A nearby manor house had been wonderfully decorated in the 1960s by an American heiress. When she died, and I heard that all her incredible curtains were going to be ripped out and dumped, I removed every single pair, thick with decades of dust, and kept the best for our house.
If I had had my way, I would probably have covered every bedroom in floral-printed wallpaper. (I am a child of the eighties; the influence of Colefax and Fowler, the English decorator, has never quite left me.) “Darling,” Toby would say as I showed him yet another Brunschwig & Fils pattern covered in sweet peas or daisies, “I don’t want our house to look like a Victorian B and B.” I was allowed to paper one small bedroom in climbing pink roses—a room I love, with its pink curtains lined with tartan and a vintage floral bedspread. For the “dormitory” on the attic floor, used for guests’ children, I found old-fashioned iron-and-brass bedsteads, red tartan blankets, and a wallpaper that is a reproduction of an 1860s lithograph of hunting scenes. Children adore the room—as they fall asleep, they can look at horses leaping hedges and red-coated, top-hatted riders toppling off.
Inevitably, we moved into the house three years ago with the builders still there. The garden was a symphony in mud—with Miranda Brooks’s help, we landscaped it and planted simple flower beds with beautifully scented roses, pinks, lavender, and wisteria. With the hard work done, we finally started to enjoy living on our farm. During the week, while the girls are at school, I write every morning in my tiny, second-floor, light-filled writing room with its wild valley views. I try to walk the dogs, muck out a stable, garden, or exercise my horse in the afternoons. What’s the point of living in the country, after all, if you don’t get into it every day?
I also spend large amounts of time dealing with my various feathered friends. For a while Toby had talked about getting chickens, an idea I resisted. But then, for his last birthday, I bought four Hamburgs—black-and-white dotted bantams whose graphic markings reminded me of the hats from the Ascot scene in My Fair Lady. A strange thing happened: Toby was completely uninterested in the chickens (sheep are his thing), but I adored them. I quickly bought more and soon added ten guinea fowl that scream like sirens every time a stranger arrives in the yard. I now have more than 30 birds. And then there were the peacocks.
A friend, Duran Duran bassist John Taylor, had bred too many at his Wiltshire home. My love of poultry by now well established, I agreed to take delivery of two peacocks and a peahen. So that the birds would “stick” to the farm when they were released, as per John’s instructions, I kept them in a large stable for more than two months. Ursula, infatuated, insisted on sitting on a hay bale, sketching them for hours on end.
When I finally let the peacocks out this past May, they strutted around the farmyard nervously for a few hours. They soon flew up to the roof of the house, perching there dramatically and roosted on a high beam in the barn, tooting occasionally. But within a week, they were gone. What would I tell John Taylor? There were local sightings, and I received a furious phone call from a house in the valley: Would I please come and get my peacocks, who were destroying the vegetable patch? By the time we got there, they’d gone.
We soon discovered that one of the peacocks was living on the grounds of a manor house a few fields away. I took a cage and bags of peanuts (their favorite food) to try and lure it home—to no avail. Now, when I ride past, I often see it fanning its iridescent tail feathers in the front garden. The chatelaine is so polite that she occasionally drops me a line on her engraved stationery updating me on the renegade’s progress. “The peacock is becoming very tame,” she recently wrote, “and mingles happily with the dog, hens, my Cochin cock, and the cat from up the lane.”
But I still live in hope that my peacocks will return.