Centuries Deep

Surrounded by terraced gardens and rolling hills, a historic Cotswolds country manor gets a stunning redo—its first in more than 50 years—thanks to its owners, London designer Justin Van Breda and entrepreneur Alastair Matchett.

- Laura Freeman

IT IS A SPRING AFTERNOON of incomparable beauty when Justin Van Breda drives from the Kemble train station in Gloucestershire, a place of candy-striped ironwork, doves in the rafters, and daffodils in pots on the platform. Overnight, cornflowers have come up in the south Cotswolds lanes, blue as the sky. “They weren’t there yesterday,” says Van Breda. It has taken a couple of weeks of swooning sunshine to call the countryside to life. “England is like a greenhouse,” he says, winding through wooded lanes. “A little heat, and whoomf! Everything comes up.”

Van Breda, a South African–born, London-based interior designer with a refined yet eclectic eye, is irrepressibly good company. Passing through a neighboring village, he tells the story of the duchess in her dotage who sleeps with her tiara cut into the mattress for safekeeping. He jokes that when he first came to England to work for Nicholas Haslam, the designer used to introduce him as “my giraffe.” (He is strikingly tall.) Today, Van Breda designs furniture with immaculate attention to finish and fabrics whose patterns take their cues from sources as diverse as botanical prints and Georgian architecture.

The first time Van Breda discovered these lanes—barely wide enough for a horse and cart, let alone two passing Land Rovers—it was quite a different day. It was late November, darkening already at teatime, darker and colder still when he arrived at Watercombe, the house his partner, Alastair Matchett, a financial analyst, had bought and wanted so much to show him. The next morning, “It was like stepping through the wardrobe into Narnia. Snow had fallen while we slept. The landscape was magical.” He fell in love with the house then.