GARDEN LEAVE

After an epic search, landscape designer Miranda Brooks and architect Bastien Halard found the English house of their dreams. All they had to fix was everything.

-  HAMISH BOWLES

When her eldest daughter Poppy was a baby, then Brooklyn-based landscape architect Miranda Brooks would stay in London with her friend India Jane Birley at Thurloe Lodge.

Among the embarrassment of very beautiful objects in this treasure trove house owned by Birley's late father Mark, the celebrated maestro of London clubs, were a pair of Wedgwood tureens in the kitchen printed with magic realism designs from 1939 by the artist Eric Ravilious-a pattern called, aptly enough, 'Garden'. Noticing how Brooks "coveted them like mad", as she admits, her hostess told her, "If you ever move back to England, I'm giving those to you."

Sixteen years on finds Brooks and her husband, French-born architect Bastien Halard; and their daughters, Poppy, 16, and Violette Grey, 14; a quartet of horses; Cuckoo the whippet and Toto the Jack Russell; cats Caliban and Tempette; a batch of broody bantams-all named for New York friends the couple miss-and a flotilla of remarkably well-socialised Indian Runner ducks (named for the family's favourite Van Leeuwen ice cream flavors) all installed at Catswood, a rambling 17th-century farmhouse in England's picturesque Cotswolds. Those tureens have pride of place on the table in the kitchen that Halard designed.

The journey to this bucolic scene, however, was long and complicated. Halard had, he says, been "visiting houses in England for years and years and years", but inspired by his grandparents' French château, had restricted himself to 18th-century Georgian examples with high ceilings and tall windows, "because", as he maintains, "that's all I saw that I could possibly tolerate."