Plum valley
A boldly and beautifully restored farmhouse and barn combines subtlety and respect for the past as much as it expresses individuality and a refreshing disregard for convention.
WORDS Graham wood PHOTOGRAPHY elsa young
The story of this house – a century-old farmhouse in a lush valley – says the owner, “is about a house and a farm with an old soul that was resurrected, land that was brought back to life and the joy of living one’s dream”.
Part of that dream was simply to have a place of their own. The owners had studied together at university when they were younger and had always nurtured the idea that they might return.
Vines have been cultivated in the valley for hundreds of years, and these days you can barely throw a stone without hitting one of the country’s top chefs (or a tourist), but the couple hoped to find something hidden away, quiet, tranquil and with beautiful trees. They almost weren’t even shown this house because it was so unassuming and off the beaten path. But it was exactly what they’d hoped for: it had century-old trees and orchards, and the feeling that it could “wrap its arms around us and be a space where we would feel safe and secure”.
The main house dates back more than a century, to 1904. It pops up in some of the books chronicling the local history of the area. In its day, it must have seemed quite modern and iconoclastic, although now, with century-old vines and wisteria climbing the pergolas over its moss-covered verandah, the house looks as settled in the valley as any traditional gabled home. And outside, there is a genuine example of traditional local architecture: a barn dating back to 1830.
CHARACTER AND CHARM The “cracked and wonky” cement pavers were left largely as they were, preserving the character and sense of time inherent in the materials in and around the house.
While various kinds of fruit had been cultivated on the farm over the centuries (including grapes, of course), the owners discovered that it had once singlehandedly produced more plums than the rest of the valley put together. “We are not plum farmers, but we thought to ourselves, we can make this work,” says the owner.
So they replanted the orchards with exciting new varietals and built up the farm to full production. It has been a long, difficult process, but, insists the owner, “being involved in the noble process of growing food, when the work lifts your spirits and the only standard you live by is to do good work is tremendously rewarding.”
“Initially, we just painted the house white and lived in it for a while,” she says. But gradually the couple began to develop a sense of how they could make it their own, guided by the ethos of agricultural honesty at the heart of the farm’s operations and a love of nature.
The wild grasses and naturalistic planting of the garden are a riotous celebration of nature; the house, a little like its unconventional design, became a bold statement of individuality and personal taste expressed in humble, honest materials, renovated and decorated with the help of renowned interior designer Heidrun Diekmann.
First, however, they converted the barn into an office with the help of Richard Perfect and Dylan Meyer of Perfect Tippet Architects. The owner says, however, that the little restoration and alteration project turned out to be “more than we bargained for”. The foundations needed to be completely rebuilt, the floors needed to be replaced and the gable end was leaning out and threatening to topple over. It basically had to be gutted, but the restoration revealed the original clay bricks beneath the plaster (plus a few gaps filled in with cement bricks, which were removed and replaced with originals), which are now displayed in their glorious raw state. They’re contrasted with smooth screeded cement floors in an interplay of raw and refined that is sustained throughout the barn.
Rather than the whitewash treatment traditionally given to the local architecture, the barn was painted a sort of olive, khaki colour. “It settles so beautifully into the landscape without standing out,” says Diekmann. “It’s very subtle and understated.”
But it also reveals an approach that is utterly individual, with a sense of confidence and personality that disregards trends, the opinions of others, and, as much as it has respect for tradition, is happy to flout convention.
LIGHT AND AIRY The century-old farmhouse still allows air and light to enter through doors and windows that capture the views of the plum orchard.
Diekmann and the owners made very few alterations to the main house. New bathrooms were added, and a guestroom outside was made accessible from the inside. The old main entrance had become obsolete, and in its place a bay window extension to the existing bathroom captures the beautiful views of the valley beyond now. But otherwise, the structure of the house stayed as was.
“The vision was to celebrate the existing patina and simplicity of farm life, to restore with respect and honour the old bones,” she says.
“Being involved in the noble process of growing food, when the work lifts your spirits and the only standard you live by is to do good work is tremendously rewarding.”
The worn wooden floors were embraced. Where pavers on the veranda were “cracked and wonky”, often they were left as they were, celebrating rather than disguising signs of age, wear and the passage of time. Where the thick trunk of the great old wisteria creeper had cracked a column on the veranda, it was left untouched. “If you were to fix that, you’d simply destroy the character,” says Diekmann.
In fact, where the veranda was extended, the new clay bricks were treated with a mixture of manure and yoghurt, mixed with moss from the adjacent paving so they’d blend with the originals. (It worked!)
When it comes to the furnishings, there’s little that was out-of-the-box. (And then “only to the extent that the eye doesn’t pick it up,” says Diekmann.) The materials palette she chose speaks of farm life: metal, timber, leather, stone. Raw metal (oiled to prevent it from rusting) has been used as shadow lined dado rails, for example. The washstands in the bathrooms have flamed granite tops with hand chipped edges to celebrate the touch of the human hand.
“I prefer using texture over pattern,” she says. Although the fabrics throughout the house are always plain – linen, cotton, silk, worn leather and sisal – the variety of their textures and colours becomes a kind of pattern itself. “My preference is for textures with visual and tactile heft, balanced with the gauzy and transparent – like the curtains which filter the bright light of day but still allow the outside in,” she says.
The colours that appear in the house sometimes pick up on the green shades of the grasses in the garden, sometimes those of the plains such as sunburnt olive and grey.
In a number of the rooms, it feels almost as if some of the large-scale prints of works by Dutch Masters on the walls, selected because they have special meaning for the owners, have breached their frames and filtered into the real world. The midnight blue, yellow and calico in Vermeer’s Milkmaid, for example, are picked up in the dining room. In an interleading room outside the guest room, details from Young Woman with a Pearl Necklace, also by Vermeer, are echoed in the dark, glossy chest of drawers and the buttery soft yellow silk curtains in the main bedroom.
Sometimes, the two approaches (art and nature) meet, as in the wallpaper printed from another small work by a Dutch painter, Hendrik Voogt, of a Tuscan landscape with pine trees. It not only animates a room that might otherwise have been a dull interleading space but also evokes the pine-covered hillside outside through the prism of a beloved artwork.
LIVING SPACES There is an emphasis on natural materials and rich textures throughout all of the living rooms.
There’s a slight nod to the Dutch roots of the architectural and agricultural history of the area in the choice of Dutch Masters, but it’s not a strong insistence. It’s also a facet of Diekmann’s way of bringing the outside in, of connecting with the honest beauty of farm life, as captured in Vermeer’s magically swirling milk, for example.
The idiosyncratic collections that adorn tabletops and mantlepieces – memorabilia the owners had accumulated over a lifetime – not only catch the eye but also reveal a “passion for discovery” and add a layer of personal history. At the same time, other finds, from feathers to flowers brought in from outside express a bond with the farm and its landscape.
It’s a way of doing things that reflects Diekmann’s “preference for spaces that are strong, with clear and forceful identities, that captivate the senses, command and fulfil the eye”. It’s an approach that beautifully resolves the imperatives of creating a home with individuality and personality, while remaining respectful of history, nature and the life of the farm.
