Charlotte Stockdale and Marc Newson open the doors to their countryside haven
Photography Norbert Schoerner
Charlotte Stockdale and Marc Newson have spent a decade turning their grand Jacobean house into a peaceful home that is the heart of their family. Derek C. Blasberg takes the tour.
The renowned Australian industrial designer Marc Newson and top British fashion stylist Charlotte Stockdale first met in Paris in 1994. She was a model at the time, dating a photographer who had been commissioned to shoot an up-and-coming furniture designer. She had wanted to switch from modeling to becoming a fashion editor, and decided this would be a good job to start with. “I looked at this guy Marc Newson’s furniture and figured, he’s into futuristic, super space-age stuff — probably aliens, too,” she says, referring to his early collections which were partly produced in Aston Martin factories. “So, I dressed him up as an astronaut.” In her own defense, this was pre-digital — she couldn’t just Google him. And she didn’t yet know the rules of collaborating on a public person’s image. “I hadn’t styled anyone who wasn’t a model, so it didn’t even cross my mind that an industrial designer wouldn’t want a costume,” she says. “And he was strangely compliant.” It would be easy to say the planets aligned that day. (It’d also be a lazy metaphor.) But it was more like a shooting star far off in the distance.
It wasn’t until more than a decade later, when Stockdale’s photographer boyfriend was gone, and Newson had moved from his native Australia full-time to Paris, that they reconnected after bumping into each other on the street. “[When we first met] he had been super career-focused and serious, and traveling all over the world. I was starting a new career and finding my way,” she says. “It was right when it was right.” The fateful reunion was in 2006; they had a daughter, Imogen, in 2007; and they were married in 2008. At first, they moved between their flats in London and Paris. A sister for Imogen, Lucienne, joined the family — which also includes two dogs and “three of the fattest cats in the world” — when she was four. But as their kids got older, they settled in London for their schooling.
As we drove down the driveway, I saw a Cedar of Lebanon tree, and I just knew it was a good sign
CHARLOTTE STOCKDALE
Cut to the mid-2010s, and the idea of a countryside weekend retreat came calling. “I thought the sensible thing to do would be to find a small house that we could rent, and see if we even liked it,” Stockdale says. “Of course, we did the opposite.”
An agent they had met in the pages of Country Life — a media institution in the UK — emailed them about a listing they thought would make for an enjoyable day trip out of the hubbub of city life. “We came down, had a nice lunch at the pub, and as we drove down the driveway, I saw a Cedar of Lebanon tree, and I just knew it was a good sign,” she says. Of course, this house was much larger, much older, and required much more work than they had planned. “But we stayed two hours, walked around and around, fell in love with it — and that was that.”
It has many of my favorite things: a bar, books, a fireplace, and a portrait of my mother.
CHARLOTTE STOCKDALE
CHARLOTTE WEARS JACKET, CHANEL, CHARLOTTE’S OWN
The house is in Gloucestershire, a large Jacobean pile that dates back centuries. The most recent parts of the house were finished in 1633. They closed on the property in 2015, beginning what has become a nearly decade-long renovation, and counting. (They still haven’t finished two guest bedrooms.) “I was obsessed with doing things correctly, and of the right period,” Newson says. “If something didn’t turn out right, we re-did it. I figured it would only take a few weeks to redo something, versus a lifetime of irritation at having not done it perfectly.”
That meant using the correct lime plaster, lath instead of plasterboard, correct stonemasonry, distemper instead of paint, restoring casements for window panes with glass that’s two millimeters thick, and refurbishing lead external guttering and downpipes — “like a half mile of it,” Newson says. (Yes, those are faces in the drains — locally, they’re known as “rainwater heads”.) “As the house is early 17th century, we wanted to keep it as authentic as possible, so it was more of a curation than anything else.” So, what about the décor? “Of course, we are also horribly opinionated, so it only really works with light-handed advice,” Stockdale says. Her friend Honor Hebblethwaite, who is a professional decorator with a history of working with stately homes (and conveniently lives down the road), helped the couple with some of the more overwhelming projects. “Like ordering more than 200 meters of fabric, just for curtains.”
Stockdale was also lucky to have the personalized attention of Emma and Edward Bulmer of Edward Bulmer Natural Paint. “They have the best colors, in addition to being plastic-free,” she says. Stockdale designed the Japanese garden after falling in love with, and planting, a mature Japanese maple tree. She sketched a path to wind around it, and Newson sourced boulders and produced concrete bases for them to sit on. She also designed what Newson calls the “cloud hedge,” an extraordinary composition of 50 separate plants that looks like one giant growth. “You can even walk through the inside of it,” he says.
CHARLOTTE WEARS NYLON DRESS AND PATENT-LEATHER SHOES, BOTH SAINT LAURENT
Stockdale’s godfather’s sister-in-law, Arabella Lennox-Boyd — aka Lady Lennox- Boyd CBE, the Italian-born English garden designer — stepped in to help the couple realize their plans for what Charlotte calls an “extraordinary planting scheme” at the front of the house, choosing plants that thrive from early April till the first frosts of January. One of Stockdale’s favorite rooms is the Wedgwood Corridor; she named it after the quintessentially British ceramic company, which inspired the wall color. When the walls were finished, however, she found a pair of antique Wedgwood chandeliers, brought them home, and realized her colors were a few shades off — “not exact,” she says. But the blending looked more harmonious. “Now, walking down this hall and into the dining room just makes me happy.”
The couple uses the dining room often — “we love it in there, even if it’s just Charlotte and me,” Newson says. He adds that even though his wife is the house chef, especially for Sunday roasts, he’s proud of how his design for the kitchen turned out. “Especially the walk-in fridge, which is basically a room itself.” Another one of Newson’s favorite spots: the boot room. “I never understood what they were until we got one,” he says, showing off an impressive collection of boots, shoes, and slippers in a full range of colors and sizes. “Now I realize they are essential in the countryside.”
So were the dozen fireplaces, which are in all the great rooms, some bedrooms, and the primary bathroom. “While rebuilding and cleaning one chimney, we discovered almost 400 mummified jackdaw birds that had accumulated over the last 300 years,” Newson says. All have been meticulously restored and work like new now.
The couple is thrilled by how lived-in the house looks, thanks to the many remarkable objects they’ve collected throughout theirlives and careers. There are several of Newson’s Extruded Tables, executed in Striato Olimpico marble, in the entry hall, and on the first-floor landing, he has positioned one of his Cloisonné chairs. That body of work draws on East Asian cloisonné traditions — intricate, metal-lined fields of color found on Chinese enamels — but scales and translates them into large-scale furniture.
The English side of Stockdale’s family has cycled through several stately homes over generations, so she has hung family portraits, including one of Sir William Fermor, a great-great-great — maybe more, but who’s counting — grandfather. In the drawing room, a portrait figures a distant family relative with a pronounced profile; “I’m really glad to say I didn’t inherit that nose,” Stockdale jokes. In the drawing room, two of Stockdale’s parents’ midcentury table lamps perfectly complement Newson’s ultramodern floor lamps.
They each also have their own workspaces — actually, two of them. In addition to a workshop next to the garage, Newson has a small studio on the first floor, filled with model cars and a framed portrait by Annie Leibovitz of him with Jony Ive, the former Apple Inc. design chief with whom he has collaborated for years. “[Charlotte and I] are both creatives, but it’s convenient that we understand the nature of that kind of work,” he says. “We travel like crazy, and the boundary between work and pleasure is always blurred. I think it would be hard for anyone else to understand how consuming our professions are.” He’s also proud of a meticulously organized wardrobe, with cedar-lined closets that smell delicious. Stockdale has filled an entire top-floor annex with racks (and racks and racks) of clothes that she’s collected from a lifetime working in fashion. Her dressing room, a floor below, has curtains, armchairs, and a sofa in a bright floral pattern that she says wasn’t allowed in any of the other rooms. On the mantelpiece is a collection of fashion-show invitations she’s saved over the years, an embroidered still life of flowers from a recent trip to Vietnam (her maternal grandparents lived there), personal notes from Karl Lagerfeld, old photos of her father, Supreme lighters, and a Palace tea set from Katie Lyall, her longtime partner in Chaos, the creative studio they co-founded in 2016.
Two opinionated creatives cohabitating could have been a recipe for disaster, but they learned to compromise in the design process. “We divided a lot, and took turns conquering,” Stockdale says. She adds with a laugh, “Creative differences were usually settled by me stalking off into the garden with a bottle of claret and the dogs, and letting him do what he was going to do anyway.”
CHARLOTTE WEARS SHIRT AND TROUSERS, BOTH MIU MIU, BOTH CHARLOTTE’S OWN
The only disagreements arose when Newson, ever the engineer, wanted to resolve the imperfections inherent to a house that dates back centuries. But, Stockdale is proud of the first-floor hallway she convinced Newson to keep asymmetrical, and a wonky door frame that leads from a guest room to a toilet. “The only battles I won,” she says of the two. (The compromise was that beyond the wonky door, Newson designed a perfectly symmetrical bathroom in a precious marble that looks like melting ice.)
“It’s great to know this will be a forever house, so it adds a level of continuity and stability,” Newson says. “We would both recognize what a non-negotiable decision was and instinctively back off, and many things we were very aligned on,” Stockdale adds. “A description of most marriages, I think.”
It’s great to know this will be a forever house
MARC NEWSON
CHARLOTTE WEARS SWEATER, JW ANDERSON, AND VINTAGE JEANS, MARC BY MARC JACOBS, BOTH CHARLOTTE’S OWN
PHOTOGRAPHY NORBERT SCHOERNER.
HAIR DECLAN SHEILS AT PREMIER HAIR & MAKE-UP USING HAIR BY SAM MCKNIGHT.
MAKEUP JOEY CHOY AT THE WALL GROUP.
DIGITAL TECHNICIAN LUCAS BULLENS.
PHOTOGRAPHY ASSISTANT OLIVIA KUROWSKA.
POST PRODUCTION SUPERMODIFIED.
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