I’VE HAD THESE PHOTOS of Plum Sykes‘ home in the Cotswold Hills saved since it was featured in Vogue in the fall of 2016, while we were still living in the city, and long before we ourselves moved to a similar life in the English countryside. What I hadn’t realised was that this impossibly chic and cosy cottage was entirely new, but made to look like it has been there for centuries.
As Sykes had remarked in her feature in Vogue, “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.”
Unfortunately, however, the original old farm cottage that Plum and her husband Toby found on more than 100 acres of land with barns, stables, and surrounding fields filled with sheep was “damp, cramped, and subsiding”. It would be kept as a boot room, nursery, and utility area, with a new front added on to it. And with the help of rustic oak beams, William Morris’s classic “Willow Boughs” wallpaper (designed in 1887), tartans, florals, and those astonishing countryside views, new becomes convincingly old. Scroll through for a glimpse…
