I first remember visiting Glyn Cywarch with my then fiancé, Francis. It must have been about 1984.
I remember the drive there, across the two mountain ranges between the town of Harlech and our house in Shropshire. And I remember thinking how it got more and more impossibly romantic on the way, with Snowdon, the deep valleys, and then great tidal waves of mountains coming toward you—and the sea. From a distance you could see Harlech Castle to the southwest, which stood out like a little broken tooth on the promontory.
Francis’s father, William David Ormsby Gore, the fifth Baron Harlech (just David to friends), and his wife, Pamela Harlech, had invited us to dinner, and I was a bit wide-eyed about the whole thing. Pamela had refurbished Glyn Cywarch’s ancient manor house, which had been in the family since 1616, in the 1970s—filling it with deep pile carpets and gleaming wood and silver—and my sense was of extreme comfort: a tapestry of personalities and history and warmth.
Francis and I were married in 1986, and then along came our son, Jasset, and daughter, Tallulah. After that, we would spend a theoretical half-year in Wales—all of Christmas, all of Easter, then the whole summer. The sadness was that Francis’s father had died in 1985, and inheriting the house came with towering death duties, and the puzzle of making it all work. But I left that
to him, and worried chiefly about making Glyn Cywarch a home.
We would fill the house up with friends; at one point I felt like I was running a hotel, for all the bed-making and trips down to the beach before breakfast and then up to the waterfalls for a picnic. We had Easter egg hunts that went on for hours, with really difficult clues that went up into the woods, or to the crenelated little folly, and there were secret places in the garden. It was wild
and wonderful.
Once, I showed Franca Sozzani some pictures that a friend of mine, Tessa Traeger, had taken when we’d had a whole gang staying at the house. We’d all been dressing up and going into the woods and putting branches on our heads, and I think Franca saw the freedom and the sense of the eternal child in them—all of which was very Bruce Weber. So, he came and photographed our family, friends, horses, and dogs for Vogue Italia in 1997. It rained and rained, as it does in Wales, but nobody seemed to mind.
After Francis died, in 2016, and the house passed to Jasset, I remember saying to him that some places are so spiritually linked with an ancient family—to the point that the stone steps have been worn away by generations, and the land has been loved and treasured and known like the palm of somebody’s hand—they’re irreplaceable. He determined, therefore, that after paying the taxman (which he did with the profits from an enormous sale of furniture, art, and jewelry at Bonhams in 2017) he would keep the estate and restore a house that was in really bad condition. There had been fire damage, water damage, ivy growing inside—you name it. It was a Grade II*–listed building, teetering on the edge of ruin. One had to do the right thing.
Now, seven years on, what’s changed? The grand façade looks the same, just beautifully repaired. The inside is very different. We couldn’t take it back to being Jacobean—it already had its ’70s thumbprint, and Grade II*–listed buildings (identified as “particularly important buildings of more than special interest”) can’t be significantly altered without consent from local authorities—so we found work-arounds. If the flagstones in the Long Room had been ripped up and replaced by parquet laid onto concrete 50 years ago, our idea was to add under-floor heating and a beautiful polished cement overlay that would have the feel and the warmth of flagstones.
We worked with great enthusiasm and innocence, Jasset, Tallulah, and I. Jasset took on the finances and big exterior elements, like repairing the roof. And he was brilliantly correct in working to take the house off of fossil fuels; it’s entirely heated by the heat pump in a waterfall.
Tallulah and I did what you might term interior decorating, but operating solely on vision and feel. We had a very strict budget, but we wanted elegance and refinement, even if in a very laid-back way. So everything had to be perfect: every tap, every bath, every shower. We placed a lot of orders on Etsy.
I’m proud of so many rooms. I love the Coronet Room, with its curving windows. I had a beautiful Fendi mattress in what we call the Elizabethan Room, so I asked a friend of mine to make a bed using the bits of Jacobean carving that we found around a fireplace in another building; we figured out that they had actually come from a four-poster bed. I love the Poet’s Room, where Ellis Wynne once wrote and, we believe, drew the dragons and flora on the walls. We converted the loft space—with its overflowing old suitcases and hampers beneath the exposed beams and rafters—into what will be a yoga room. I love the dining room because of the fireplace, but the Long Room has two of them.
Outside, my friend Sarah Husband has created a garden that’s exquisitely romantic, with these little hidden places—like it had when the children were small—but she’s also opened it up. The walled garden has a couple of ancient, pleached apple trees and a lime avenue, and Sarah’s brilliant and rebellious idea was to disrupt its perfect geometry by opening one side of it to naturalized bulbs, wildflowers, and nut trees—in other words, to create a nuttery, bring the birds in, and get rid of the huge border, which was difficult to manage. On the other side of the trees will be a potager, in time. We share our 5,000 acres with farmers, and to help support the estate we’ve started renting out the house and making it available for events, but there is still an infinite list of things to do around the property.
Glyn Cywarch has a very special axis of energy—it feels teeming with thought and imagination. Great writers have written there; painters like Turner were drawn to its amazing conjunction between rock, sea, and sky; the queen came to stay. As somebody who saw ghosts once said to me, “This place is filled with so many people exchanging ideas. It’s really electrifying—and magical.” I like to think of it that way, too.
In this story: hair, Shiori Takahashi; makeup, Mathias van Hooff.