THE BRITISH ACCESSORIES designer Lulu Guinness, 65, first visited the Gloucestershire market town of Stroud some 30 years ago with her friend the designer Cath Kidston, who lived close by. At the time, Guinness was raising her two children in London with her then-husband, Valentine Guinness, of the Irish brewing clan, and running her handbag business, known for its libertine embrace of English eccentricity, including her red lip-shaped clutch and Lily of the Valley Florist bag, one of seven pieces by her in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum. She found herself drawn to this unpretentious corner of the Cotswolds, about 100 miles west of London, which she likens to the North Fork of Long Island.
Guinness returned to the region frequently and owned a weekend cottage there for several years during the 2010s, but it wasn’t until 2020, seven years after her divorce and following the deaths of her brother and mother, that she decided to move full time to the area, known as the Five Valleys. Having largely stepped back from her namesake brand — she continues to consult and design for it — she first rented a hexagonal, triple-tiered Gothic folly (nicknamed the Hat Box) in a village down the road. The move marked the beginning of an artistic reawakening for Guinness, who had learned to embroider some time before and found solace in the simple act of sewing as she gazed out at the verdant landscape.
Keen to preserve this sense of peace, Guinness embarked on a three-year search for a permanent home in the vicinity. She found one about four miles south of Stroud, amid a patchwork of green hills, a stretch so striking that Queen Victoria noted its beauty in her 1849 journal as her train steamed by. Dubbed Hyde Court, the residence, which took Guinness two years to redo, is a 2,896-square-foot, five-bedroom wing of a subdivided limestone manor dating to the 1720s, with parapet gables and shuttered, timber-cross windows with leaded iron casements.
Once included in a large property, with a coach house and stables, partly encased by a stone wall and canopied by ancient lime and copper beech trees, the house, with its undulating clay-and-slate tiled roof, was divided among three owners in the late 1940s. Guinness’s west wing had been extended in the late 19th century by the Beale family, who owned the site at the time; one of their 11 children was the educator and suffragist Dorothea Beale, who went on to found what is now St. Hilda’s College, Oxford.
“IT’S A ROMANTIC place,” says Guinness, looking out of the kitchen’s canted bay window toward a lawn where the Beales hosted dances and tennis parties. A paddock that once held alpacas runs up to the southern facade, and her property includes the stone remains of an orangery (“I have my own ruin,” she says), as well as an electric blue-painted corrugated metal garden pavilion she commissioned from the craftsman and designer Rollo Dunford Wood in the shape of a tented stage, big enough for three people and topped with a Disney-like star. It was inspired by a similar structure in the whimsical Italianate village of Portmeirion, built in north Wales as a quirky tourist attraction in the mid-20th century.
Even on a rainy May morning the home’s interior glows. “I bought this house because of the light,” says Guinness, who compares its horizontal layout to that of a train carriage. More glass than wall, the long facade has 16 casement windows, which Guinness uses to highlight her witty use of bright primary colors alongside a sophisticated profusion of pattern.
An atrium off the front door, where the kitchen had previously been, is now an airy thoroughfare with walls swathed in traditional lime plaster; on winter mornings, Guinness lights the Franklin stove vented to a chimney decorated with a vernacular plaster design she created, based on Jacobean motifs. In the right-hand corner of the space, on the terra-cotta-tiled herringbone floor, stands a Classical-style column hand-built out of foam, plaster and hessian by the Brixton-based conceptual artist Joe Sweeney, marking the entrance to a flat-roofed, copper-clad conservatory, open on two sides during the summer, its interior framework painted emerald green.
Beside it, with faux-boiserie painted panels in robin’s-egg blue, Guinness transformed the sitting room into a fanciful refuge. At the center, above an 18th-century English chaise upholstered in russet velvet, hangs a kinetic sculpture resembling a cascade of scarlet wings by the nearby artist Daniel Chadwick. A curvy French divan upholstered in a red-and-white striped satin is positioned in front of a window. Lining the walls, along with framed lengths of vintage embroidered panels, are shelves containing collectible issues of Flair magazine, pieces of coral and a vase by Pablo Picasso, as well as a 1990s version of the Trumeau Architettura, the fanciful cabinet designed by Piero Fornasetti and Gio Ponti in 1951. Guinness calls the space her Beaton Room, for the collection of rare editions of Cecil Beaton’s illustrated books, many of them gifts from her longtime romantic partner, John Ingledew, who, like Beaton, is a writer and photographer, known for his black-and-white portraits of British football fans.
At the opposite end of the house, the large, rectangular kitchen melds Classical proportions with unexpected materials and false finishes that evoke the work of the Genoa-born designer and set artist Renzo Mongiardino. The cabinetry is digitally printed with a green-and-white harlequin pattern, complete with subtle scuff marks for patina, and the fluted edges of the Italian verde marble-footed central cabinet are coated with a glaze to mimic verdigris. Matte metallics, Guinness says, “have a place in English country houses — they cheer things up.”
Such iridescence is amplified in an upstairs hallway transformed into an L-shaped dressing room with shimmering hand-block-printed foliate wallpaper in shades of gold by the artist and designer Hugh Dunford Wood, Rollo’s father. The built-in cupboards are filled with the opera coats that Guinness embroiders and sells, pieced together from antique saris, kantha quilts and embellished burlap, and the adjoining terrazzo-floored bathroom is dominated by a large mirror of her own design edged in shells. Down a hall are two guest bedrooms and a stairway to the attic, with two more bedrooms to accommodate her two grown-up daughters and year-old grandson. In one bedroom, which features Art Nouveau-inspired wallpaper by the East Sussex-based textile designer Ellen Merchant, a 19th-century English mahogany four-poster bed is draped in pieces from Guinness’s collection of early 20th-century Eastern European folk embroideries. In an attic chamber, a length of vintage voile hangs from a rafter above a bed covered in a quilt printed with poppies by the Jaipur, India-based designer Brigette Singh.
Guinness’s magpie eye and maximalist élan reach their apotheosis in the main bedroom. An entire wall has been turned into a virtual stage set inspired by the patchwork bedroom of Gloria Vanderbilt’s East 67th Street Manhattan townhouse, which was photographed by Horst P. Horst in 1970. A baroquely shaped opening is covered in blood red 19th-century French printed linen that is cut to reveal a silver leaf wall hung with a scallop-edged sink; on either side is a collaged panel of vintage textiles, embroidered remnants, ribbons and trims from a Lyonnaise weaver’s 1890s sample book. The effect, like virtually everything Guinness has touched over her 36-year career, is simultaneously phantasmagorical and cultivated — and tinged with a punk-like irreverence. “There are so many rules about good taste but, when it comes to decoration, all I care about is the feeling,” she says. “It should be uplifting. I think rules are there to be broken.”
Aimee Farrell, a freelance writer, editor and consultant based in England, reports on London’s visual arts and fashion scenes for T Magazine.
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