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By Hamish Bowles
Photography through François Halard
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When her eldest daughter, Poppy, was a baby, Brooklyn landscape architect Miranda Brooks stayed in London with her friend India Jane Birley at Thurloe Lodge.
Among the embarrassment of very charming items in this treasure space belonging to Birley’s late father, Mark, the celebrated master of London clubs, was a pair of bowls of Wedgwood soup in the kitchen published with motifs of magical realism from 1939 through artist Eric Ravilious. – a motif called, rightly, “Garden”. Realizing that Brooks “coveted them like a madman,” as she admits, her hostess told her, “If you ever go back to England, I’ll give them to you. “
Sixteen years later, Brooks and her husband, french-born architect Bastien Halard; and their daughters, Poppy, 16, and Violette Grey, 14; a quartet of horses; Hello Whippet and Toto jack Russell; the cats Caliban and Tempette; a batch of breeding dwarfs, all named after the couple’s missing friends in New York, and a flotilla of remarkably well-socialized Indian Runner ducks (named for the family’s favorite Van Leeuwen ice cream flavors) settled on Catswood, a seventeenth-century farm in England’s picturesque Cotswolds. These soup bowls have a position on the kitchen table designed by Halard.
The adventure to this bucolic scene, however, was long and complicated. Halard, he said, had “visited houses in England for years and years,” but, encouraged by his grandparents’ French castle, he had limited himself to eighteenth-century Georgian examples with the upper roofs and upper windows, “because,” as he argues, “that’s all I saw I probably tolerate. “
“Meeting him in the fields,” Brooks recalls, “was incredible. All the dilapidated buildings and the terrible old silos and barbed wire. “
The couple eventually discovered a very good example in a remote northern county, located on their own giant property. They were about to get it when Brooks learned that Halard was traveling both for ongoing projects in America and elsewhere, so he would be in this remote location. Good looks for most of the time, and Halard learned that for all its elegance, the odds of artistic transformation in the rigorously ordered home, spaces were decidedly limited. it turned out to be an epiphany. Halard called it “fascinating: you never get bored,” so the odds multiplied.
Meanwhile, his friend the artist Dan Chadwick, who lives in the mythical golden valleys of Gloucestershire (immortalized through Laurie Lee in his autobiographical novel Cider with Rosie), knew a nearby dairy farm with a seventeenth-century farm that, according to him, was worth studying. The farmer was dead and his son had built a more conveniently designed space next door.
Writer Plum Sykes, another neighbor, drove and took a surreptitious photo for Brooks and Halard in the United States. “The next stop was in person. ” Meeting him in the boxes,” Brooks recalls, “was just amazing. I sat in a box admiring the view through the buildings over an ancient forest and a wonderful submerged valley beyond, “it was just magical. So, he continues, I went back to New York and wrote to the farmers. nothing and we keep looking. And we’ve done it each and every year, each and every holiday here, looking. other things, Maryland instead.
However, before they could explore houses there, they returned to England to stay with Sykes. She wanted to know how her search was going. “I’m sorry,” Brooks told him, “but we gave up. We can only not locate anything. ” Well, what about those farmers?” asked Sykes. They never responded?” Sykes amassed the troops and went straight into space and knocked on the door. “I don’t forget your letter,” the farmer’s wife told Brooks, “and in fact, things are a little different now. “. Give me your number and we will call you.
Her husband very direct: “Do you like it? Do you need it?” Asked. “That’s how it was,” Brooks recalls, “we shook hands on the field. “
“Miranda looks at me and says, ‘I don’t see how this can become a lovely home, but I’m completely convinced you can do it,'” Halard recalls. “And my center falls!
In fact, he had his paintings cut out for him. This rainy room turned out to have a stream flowing under its linoleum floor. A dangerous staircase led from a small room to a row of rooms arranged in a row, so that one had to cross one to reach the other. bathroom downstairs. There is no logical position for a kitchen. Miranda and Bastien were so discouraged by the sinister aspect of the position that they felt they could not get their uprooted daughters to visit them.
“There was nothing of genuine ancient value left except his bones,” Halard recalls, “and everything it contained, we restored, but in general we had to start from scratch and turn it into a blank canvas, which is for other people like Miranda and me. “
For Brooks, the closure meant that every day he could see the possibilities of implementing his biodynamic gardens.
Halard has ornamentation in his genes: his great-grandfather Adolphe founded the textile and wallpaper company Nobilis, his grandfather the furniture and decoration store of the same name Yves Halard, while his grandmother Michelle and mother, Florence Chabrières, are decorators. The artist uncle François, meanwhile, took the photographs of this report. Halard’s symbol for the salon’s sober color palette was taken from James Abbott Whistler’s The Artist in his Studio, with its sophisticated palette of comfortable grays, pinks, and ivories: “There’s a kind of soft softness. “”, he explains, and combined ambitious and delicate furniture from the seventeenth to the mid-twentieth century. These space tours also encouraged the grooved plasters through the formal front corridor that also serves as a dining room, a new oak staircase, and Halard’s. fresh freehand of undulating oak leaves in the library.
Meanwhile, Brooks was desperate to have a kitchen, and for months food was cooked on a stove in the pen. However, the two former independents fell into a biblical storm and Halard was able to create a fashion design on their symbol. which, with careful excavation, now merges with the asymmetrical roof line of the original construction and gives rise to a high-ceilinged kitchen with windows framing pictorial perspectives of the lawn and landscape. make the walls and floors.
Miraculously, this design had just finished when COVID hit and Britain locked itself in. For Brooks, this meant he could see the possibilities of his biodynamic gardens every day and focus on transforming them. Fearing food shortages in the early days of after the pandemic, he dug for Britain, turning a stinky liquid manure pit into a charming orchard and planting the trail with blackberries and raspberries.
Since then, the couple has planted more than three hundred new trees, oaks now combined with beech and linden trees, loved by bees, and have created a lake for swimming. while the old stone outbuildings are restored. One is now the couple’s studio, where they paint on their individual projects and collaborate on a line of fabrics. Another will be remodeled into a Turkish bath, fostered through the couple’s beloved Russian baths in the East Village. where they went on their first date. Outside this barn, Brooks planted a ladies’ garden with pink and pink flowering apple trees from the mythical garden of Indian grandmother Rhoda Birley.
With much of the land zoned into zones for agriculture and horses having to run freely, Brooks says there wasn’t much left for the gardens. He started by creating other grades around the house and then, as he recalls, “this madness happened. “when he went to an Ayurvedic cleaning retreat in Mexico. First, Brooks had rejected what she calls “that hippie chakra thing,” but after a week of intense immersion in the practice, she found that she couldn’t escape the colors: “the chakra colors enveloped me. “Back home, his dressing room featured a bird’s-eye view “from the garden, up the hill to the hedges and fields,” inspiring a plan that mimicked the opening of the chakras. She imagined his design “moving energetically from the base of the spine to the most sensitive of the head. “
That’s precisely what the gardens he created with gardener Rachel (“my biodynamic witch”), as well as her colleagues Will, Lorraine and Louise do.
The red grass “melting” on the newly created terrace outside the kitchen is an insurrection of Phlomis italica, pulsatilla, geum, valerian, the darkest red peonies and the rose Souvenir of Dr. Jamain, a rose that grew outdoor Brooks’ room of the formative years. “It was huge and it would be my bedroom, which I think was amazing. “
This leads to the solar plexus, represented through the small yellow lawn in front of the front façade of the house, a bright impressionist mist of yellow achillea, Benton’s iris, digitale lutea, evening primrose and honeysuckle. Then comes the central chakra, with cloudy clouds. yews and boxed lime trees and a row of mature trellis pear trees discovered in Belgium, and a flat lawn created for Poppy and Violette Grey to play badminton. geraniums, scabies and lilacs.
This sloping site is topped with a semicircular tapestry hedge to celebrate the spot where the family came to picnic when they arrived at a construction site. The lilac plantations here constitute “his third eye,” as Brooks notes, and foam with the flowers of an orchard that includes plums and plums in spring.
“You’re just the caretaker of a space, right?” said Halard. Especially a space like this”
When beloved circle of relatives friend Stella Tennant died in late December 2020, a dying Brooks was encouraged to create another lawn to celebrate her, centered around a perfectly circular pond cradled in the protective embrace of a low hill – the center of the grass. . It was conceived as “an absolutely still piece of water, a reflecting pool in which the stars can be seen at night”. These Indian Runner ducks, however, soon claimed it as their own, “and now it’s just a duck pond. ” Stella, she thinks, would have fun. Here, Brooks planted Magnolia stellata, Tennant’s beloved perennial candy peas, and Rosa complicata, “which is very appropriate,” says Brooks. “But it’s also bright pink, which she loved. I always felt that whenever Stella came to stay, it was like that kind of wind came into the house, there was something so fast and windy. ” in the. And being here, you feel this wind around you and there’s a lot of sky, which was also important. But then you can retreat and feel safe from the shores. In a way, the most productive thing about this lawn is that it means we say its call almost every single day.
Inside his home, recalling visiting all the houses of grandiose proportions of the eighteenth century, Brooks learned that “in fact, in England it is great to be in those long, low rooms, especially in winter. “
“You’re just the caretaker of a space, right?” adds Halard. “Especially in a space like this. In fact, I believe in the spirit of a space: a space talks and has emotions, and she was definitely very angry at first, very embarrassed when we started cutting everything. But now she feels so fair and proud.
In this story: hair, Louis Byrne; makeup, Andrew Denton.
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