Photograph: Nicky Johnston
If you’ve seen Sarah Beeny’s New Life in the Country, you will know exactly what her house is like: unimaginably vast, unsettlingly new, modelled on a stately home but manifestly not one, like a fairytale you’re slightly too old for. But even knowing it inside out, I was still surprised to find that it actually existed, that anyone lives like that. You enter through a porch into a massive boot room, where everyone in the family has a floor-to-ceiling locker, stencilled with their name, which is what, I guess, contributes to the incredible sense of order, the un-stately-home tidiness. The rolling view from the dining room windows is enough to make you drop to your knees in quasi-religious thanksgiving. “Sometimes I have the doors open and think: ‘This is actually not real,’” she says. “This is like a holiday camp.” Even her dogs, who caper into the high-ceilinged drawing room, oblivious to how charming sitting on that Chesterfield is going to make them look, are perfect.
Beeny has adapted seamlessly to the dress code of The Simple Life (the title of her book about this escapade, published this August); she’s a jeans and shirt and (probably, when she’s going outdoors) wellies person now, after more than two decades of her distinctive, rock-chick-goes-to-a-meeting-with-the-bank-manager style. The main difference is that her hair is still very short, after treatment for breast cancer, which she was diagnosed with last August.
