Interior designer Flora Soames' restorative West Country cottage
Flora Soames was in her early twenties when she first set eyes on her cottage. She was walking across White Sheet Hill, an unspoilt landscape of sweeping chalk grassland that is close to the border between Wiltshire and north Dorset. ‘I remember looking down across beautiful parkland at this house, nestled in the woods,’ she says. It would take more than a decade – and the greatest heartbreak – to lead her back there.
Three years ago, after they had lived together between Norfolk and London, Flora’s partner Anthony Gordon Lennox died suddenly after a short illness. In the months after his death, searching for a place to heal, Flora spent time in this part of the West Country, riding her horse on the rolling hills. She was drawn here by the couple’s great friends Claudia and Jonathan Rothermere, from whom she now rents the cottage.
‘I had waved goodbye to London life,’ she says. ‘I needed to be somewhere I could put down roots, a place to call mine. I knew the area from riding here and Ant and I had friends nearby. But, really, I put a pin in the map.’ The house – a former gamekeeper’s cottage on the Ferne estate – had been a safe haven for others before her. ‘Before I came, people had rented it to take a pause from life, to feel cosseted and restored,’ she says. She signed the lease without ever properly viewing it; it just felt right. ‘I had only ever seen the outside of it the day I moved in,’ she says. ‘I’d ridden past it many times and once even peered through the windows.’ It is the sort of house you do not forget: its front has perfect symmetry and it is reached by a winding drive, with the sense that you are miles from anywhere and anyone.
MAY WE SUGGEST: Flora Soames' debut fabric collection is inspired by her archive of antique textiles
‘I was not in the best frame of mind when I moved here,’ she says. ‘I did worry: will it be oppressive to live in the woods like this? It’s so different to where I grew up in Norfolk, which is so open and flat and light-filled. But it hasn’t been at all. I just wanted to be here, to feel protected and safe. It is an incredibly enveloping place and very restorative. It was about gradually building oneself up again.’
The cottage is surrounded by woodland and Flora initially struggled to grow anything in the garden, because the deer and badgers ate everything. ‘I’d brought all these pots of things that had flourished in Norfolk and, within three weeks, everything had been munched.’ Two thousand tulip bulbs were decimated by squirrels. There was an outdoor pool, in an enclosed garden beside the house. ‘I wouldn’t even swim in the Bahamas, so I thought, sod it, I’m not going to heat this.’ The Dorset-based garden designer Jane Hurst helped Flora plant beds around the pool (which is now more of a pond), with a wild, cuttings-focused and naturalistic scheme. ‘I had such a longing to grow and nurture something,’ Flora says.
When she arrived in the spring with three vans full of her possessions, the cottage was a blank canvas with white walls throughout and ‘pine everywhere – I needed to throw myself into putting my stamp on the place’. Her bedroom had to be the priority: ‘I wanted to feel it was mine.’ She papered the walls in a soft, putty-hued floral Pierre Frey wallpaper and installed a tester made of gossamer-thin voile by Rose Uniacke. The paintings and objects – a lamp with a frilled-silk shade from her grandmother’s dressing table, a photograph by Robert Montgomery bought just after Ant died – all have deep meanings for her. They are the things she owns that matter the most.
MAY WE SUGGEST: At home in Oxfordshire with the art dealer and broadcaster Philip Mould
There are profound connections and stories attached to every item – a sunburst clock that was once her great-grandfather’s; the collection of asparagus plates, which Flora spent 10 years tracking down. It is a house that reveals the fruits of a lifetime of collecting – buying from dealers, scouring car-boot sales and the markets of France and, more recently, buying directly from Instagram, all of which has given her a whip-smart sense of what it is that she loves and does not love.
The 30 metres of discontinued Bennison floral fabric she bought 20 years ago (with a feeling that she might some day live in a house it would suit) has been made into curtains in the spare room. The appliqué cow artwork in the kitchen was bought at the Sotheby’s sale of possessions of the late Duchess of Devonshire. ‘I’d lost out on quite a few things I wanted and when I bid on it, I was in a meeting and imagining it was about 20cm square. Then it arrived, and it was… huge.’ It now covers nearly a whole wall in the kitchen.
Like previous tenants of the cottage, Flora is beginning to outgrow this place. It has worked its healing magic, and it gave her the time and space to reconnect with her creativity and launch her first fabric collection. In December 2018, at the local shop, she bumped into an old friend of Anthony’s, the ceramic sculptor Alexander Macdonald-Buchanan, who lived nearby. The two fell in love and their baby, Lily Hope, was born last April: a new chapter has begun. ‘Moving here gave me a reason to start again – it gave me independence,’ she says. ‘We live such transient lives, but home is the one constant – the things in it are a powerful common thread on the journey through life.’
Flora Soames: florasoames.com
Flora Soames is a member of The List by House & Garden, you can view her profile here.
Simon Upton1/17The early 19th-century cottage is surrounded by woodland.
Simon Upton2/17
Simon Upton3/17The cabinets are painted in ‘Indigo’ by Edward Bulmer. An antique Swedish refectory table from Talisman is teamed with Arts and Crafts chairs with seat pads in leather from Soane.
Simon Upton4/17Flora’s grandmother’s sofa (upholstered in Bennison’s ‘Old Roses’) is covered with an antique Swedish throw.
Simon Upton5/17The table was bought from the Instagram dealer Tradchap. The chairs are upholstered in B Berger’s ‘1158’ fabric in sangria.
Simon Upton6/17Panels from an antique Fortuny screen hang on the wall.
Simon Upton7/17Flora sits with her cocker spaniel, Humbug, surrounded by the antique textiles she uses for inspiration, as well as fabrics and lampshades from her own collection. One of her printed linens, ‘Cornucopia’ in emerald & plum, is seen on the antique daybed in the foreground.
Simon Upton8/17
Simon Upton9/17
Simon Upton10/17
Simon Upton11/17Humbug and Coco sit on the bed with a pair of ‘Enid’s Garland’ cushions from Flora’s collection. A watercolour of her father as a young boy hangs on the wall with two Norfolk landscapes by Harry Cory Wright. The curtains are in Belgian linen from Flora’s friend Nicole Fabre.
Simon Upton12/17The ‘Fleurs de Mai’ wallpaper is from Pierre Frey.
Simon Upton13/17
Simon Upton14/17Flora decorated this before she knew it was destined for her daughter Lily Hope, but it turned out to be the perfect nursery. She made the lampshade from a treasured piece of antique silk.
Simon Upton15/17The ‘Dahlias’ wallpaper is Flora’s own design.
Simon Upton16/17The ceramic sculpture, Energy, is by Flora’s partner, Alexander Macdonald-Buchanan.
Simon Upton17/17The swimming pool, now a pond, is surrounded by naturalistic planting.
