Back within the spring, designer Alice Temperley was scouring on-line market Preloved for classic material and ended up within the pet part. “Inside an hour, I had pushed 5 miles up the street and are available residence with a home rabbit. Florence is a tremendous character, both very rampant or very cuddly. She lives underneath the piano within the sitting room, the place all of us hang around.”
“We” is Temperley and Fox, her 11-year-old son, any chickens who “simply come into the home once they really feel prefer it” and naturally Florence. The 4 llamas stay outdoors. “They’ve all the time bought their heads simply barely over the backyard wall.”
Freedom and flare are the watchwords in Cricket Court docket, Temperley’s Somerset residence, a Grade II-listed stone folly in-built 1811. She rented it in 2010 “once I was determined to get out of London and have some house with my baby”. She’d appeared spherical it one “golden night” together with her father, who lives on a cider farm in the identical city, the place Temperley grew up. “The home appeared like a magic place. I hadn’t seen a home prefer it.” She finally purchased the eight-bedroom Regency manor home and, two years in the past, moved down completely.
There’s a fantastic synergy between the rule-breaking interiors and Temperley’s romantic collections. “There may be escapism in the home and in my work,” she says, whose followers embrace Florence Welch, Beyoncé and the Duchess of Cambridge. “It’s completely Alice in Wonderland, completely inventive. It’s fairytale, and I’m not going to disclaim that.” There are even citadel ruins – Plantagenet, no much less – within the grounds that embrace paddocks and woodland.
The infinite rooms work a sort of Britpop wit underpinned by a really grown-up English nation home aesthetic. It’s all about mixing various things that work collectively, says Temperley. “It’s the identical as when you’re doing a group – an eclectic combine tells a narrative.”
His-and-hers bogs make the purpose. “Hers” is reached through a small staircase that descends from the primary bed room. “His” rest room is “up”, reached by one other small staircase. The bathtub in “hers” is a basic rolltop, the partitions are painted in Farrow & Ball’s Pelt – “deliciously deep purple and certainly one of my favorite colors” – and there’s a conventional sink, gilt mirrors, a kilim and shuttered home windows. Up to now, so protected and English trad. Besides that the bathtub is roofed in a mosaic of mirrors, working a disco vibe on a picket ground painted with a Union Jack. “My good friend [model] Jade Parfitt and I simply determined to smash the mirror up,” says Temperley. “4 o’clock,” she provides, “is an effective time to get within the bathtub with a bottle of cider. The sunshine is nice then.”
Temperley may be very a fan of a disco ball. Her boyfriend, Marcus Cresswell, has made her “essentially the most wonderful pizza disco-oven. It sits out on the terrace by the blossom tree.” One other disco ball hangs out behind one of many portico’s 4 pillars, like a glowing visitor ready to be requested for a dance. “It fell throughout a storm. I caught it again collectively and glued flowers in it to cover the harm.” A fibreglass statue of a Grecian youth lingers close by. “It’s completely misplaced,” says Temperley. “I simply assume it’s entertaining.”
The youth may nicely really feel intimidated by the home’s classical options that embrace a double-height entrance corridor with domed ceiling. “You stroll in and also you’re surrounded by Venetian pillars and look as much as the dome. The man who designed the home [it was built by Stephen Pitt, a relative of Pitt the Younger] was obsessed by mild, as I’m. Each room has a ceiling element. He was additionally scared about hearth. A metallic balcony runs all the best way spherical the home.”
Extra mild pours into the round, wood-panelled library that contains a domed ceiling painted in deep sienna. It’s completed off with an oculus, or glass opening. Winston Churchill held secret conferences right here with British and American leaders in 1944, when the home was owned by the media magnate Lord Beaverbrook. A Tolstoy scion, Rely Nikolai, purchased the pile after the struggle.
Plaster roses are strewn throughout the coffered ceiling within the eating room, painted in Farrow & Ball’s Turkish Blue. Its French doorways lead on to the gardens, which overlook the Quantocks. In case the view wasn’t bucolic sufficient, a mural of silver blossom and peacocks, painted as a present by domestically primarily based artist Frederick Wimsett, enlivens one wall, and a pendant chandelier from Sunbury Vintage Market at Kempton Park presides over the lengthy oak eating desk, initially from Wells cathedral and picked up from Glastonbury Reclamation.
Additions had been made to the older a part of the home, which, says Temperley, explains why there are 5 flooring on one facet and three on the opposite. “It’s a mishmash of flooring and peculiar little staircases and home windows.” Its historical past makes itself felt, nevertheless. “There’s a bizarre dungeon within the basement. I don’t go in there at evening.” In reality, the cellars, thought thus far from the early Tudor interval, home a bear-pit, certainly one of only some remaining within the UK.
The lounge is a cosier affair, and basic Temperley. When she moved within the partitions had been painted “a horrible yellow, washed with sponges, and it was filled with the worst English chintz you may think about.” The partitions and the curtains are actually aubergine: “Actually earthy and actually calming.” A golden palm tree, discovered on Golborne Street, close to London’s Portobello market, sits in a single nook, simply because. “It’s the canines bollocks,” says Temperley, who likes to “plonk”. This explains the pirate ship, moored in entrance of the Venetian mirror that hangs above the Regency hearth. Two lamps inlaid with glass and a chinoiserie display screen purchased in Hong Kong add extra glitz, whereas the ottoman is roofed in “wonderful material with silver discs throughout it” and sports activities a candelabra on a brass tray.
The messy luxe vibe continues in Temperley’s bed room, the 9ft-wide mattress, handled to a rotation of quilts: sooner or later leopard print, the subsequent, one thing floral. An ER insignia with Union Jacks poking out of it hangs over the mattress, a pair of pink and crystal wall sconces both facet on the Farrow & Ball Hermitage Pink partitions. Temperley can be a fan of a flag. Her newest, a whopper union flag from Portobello Street, is to hold within the courtyard.
Wardrobes aren’t a lot in proof. “I’ve a good looking classic clothes assortment and simply grasp items round. In any other case you by no means see them.” A Turkmenistan bridal robe and a Japanese kimono grasp by the window within the visitor bed room and over the ornate headboard hangs a framed fragment of Chinese language embroidery that belonged to Temperley’s “wonderful” grandmother, a collector of materials.
Fox is equally industrious. When he’s not practising within the piano room that adjoins the lounge, overseen by Florence the rabbit, he’s outside. “He has to do his chores and feed the llamas within the morning.” Then it’s breakfast within the kitchen, its conventional models designed by Elliott & Co: Out of The Wooden and painted a smooth inexperienced to match the Fired Earth wall tiles, vases crammed with flowers from the backyard. The brasserie mirror was picked up at Clignancourt flea market in Paris. “Every part finds its residence. That’s what I like about accumulating.”
Artwork route and style styling by Violet Naylor-Leyland; photographer’s assistant Noah Sagum
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