HOME GIRL
Downtime with Miranda Kerr
When Miranda Kerr moved into her Malibu home, it took her only a few weeks to annoy her neighbours. “I had the kitchen and the bathrooms redone, so I sent them mu ns — gluten-free, of course. ‘Really sorry about the noise, thanks for your patience.’ But no one replied,” she says with a smile. “No, ‘Thanks for the mu ns, they were yummy.’ I also play my music quite loud sometimes, and run and jump in the pool naked! Do you know that [Sia] song that goes, ‘Hey, I heard you were a wild one?’”
There’s no skinny-dipping for now. I’m sitting at Miranda’s breakfast bar as she pads around the kitchen in a red mini dress. After a hectic week of jetting from an event in LA to a shoot in New York, domesticity is what she craves. There’s a chicken casserole bubbling on the stove, and a pie crust ready for a dinner party tonight. The apple-cheeked supermodel, it turns out, is quite the Martha Stewart. She points to the pictures on her fridge, drawn by her six-year-old son, Flynn (with exhusband Orlando Bloom), which show him outside and Mummy cooking in the kitchen.
“Actually, I’m starving. Want some soup?” Miranda reaches into the exceptionally tidy fridge and pulls out a jar of green broth. “It’s mung bean,” she sings. “I made it myself.”
You can’t blame her for being a homebody. Perched on a private blu with Pacic Ocean views, the house is ready for its close-up, all lapping pool, salty breezes and crackling logs in the replace. But as beautiful and relaxing as it is, it’s also the headquarters of Kerr Inc; there are o ces out the back.
As one of the highest-paid models in the world, Miranda, 34, is always on the go and rarely has time for even a walk on the sand beyond the garden. When she’s not busy being a mum, taking “Flynnie” to school every morning, she’s busy building an empire.
Her Victoria’s Secret deal restricted her entrepreneurial ambitions, so they parted ways in 2013. Today, on top of multiple modelling contracts, she runs skincare line Kora Organics, designs tea sets for
Royal Albert and writes books; to add to her two motivational titles for young women, Empower Yourself and Treasure Yourself, there’s a recipe book on the way called Nourish Yourself (the soup, incidentally, is excellent). There are no plans for Take Some Time
For Yourself, though.
Her taste for loud music aside, Miranda is a carefully controlled woman. Despite her Australian roots, she has that classic LA combination of mellow yoga vibe and keen capitalist instinct.
She’s big on energy and vibrations on the one hand — she speaks in a calm, almost sedated way, with a questioning Aussie lilt at the end of her sentences — yet she’s almost always promoting something. Her Instagram feed (10.9 million followers and counting) is openly commercial. Her life is her business is her life. “My whole philosophy is to uplift people,” she demurs. “Everything has a positive intention behind it.”
To be clear, it was never Miranda’s intention to design tea sets
— Royal Albert approached her, as did Swarovski, for whom she designed jewellery. But once they did, she introduced her
New Age ¥avour. Her Swarovski earrings were snow¥ake-
shaped “to celebrate your unique magic”. Her teacups have inscriptions on the bottom like ‘Love’ and ‘Blessings’, “so you can feel the blessings when you drink tea”. And she pours her skincare products through rose quartz, “which I don’t talk about, but people feel it — it gives the vibration of love”.
She tells me about the late Japanese scientist Dr Masaru Emoto, who claimed to have shown that positive words can aect the molecular structure of water. “There was a study done on bags of rice,” she says. “One bag was told positive things like ‘I love you’, another bag was ignored, and another was told negative things. The rst bag was perfect, the second started to disintegrate and the last one was mouldy.”
Miranda has always been a believer. She had a religious upbringing in the small country town of Gunnedah in New South Wales. Her mother was just 17 when Miranda was born, so the model was also hugely inuenced by her grandmother, who has the quality she most admires: generosity of spirit. “We didn’t have much, but our door was always open,” says Miranda. Her father read her self-help maxims from motivational authors like Og Mandino. She scrolls through her phone for a quote. “Here’s one: ‘Treat everyone as though we’re going to be dead by midnight.’ Wow! See, if you died, I’d feel good about treating you kindly. You’re enjoying the soup, right?”
Her fairy tale began at 13, when a friend entered her into a Dolly magazine modelling competition (naturally, Miranda won), but she doesn’t consider that her most formative teenage experience.
“When my rst boyfriend [Christopher Middlebrook] died, I was 16, and it was really a turning point,” she says. “I was depressed and went to a few therapists, but then I realised the only person who could help me was myself.” She remains close to Christopher’s family, even naming her son after him — Flynn Christopher Blanchard Copeland Bloom.
Her second most testing experience in life came years later, in 2013, when she and Orlando Bloom separated. “Flynn was two, so it was really hard to make the decision, but our son is our priority so you have to come from love,” she says. “You have to be kind.” Following the divorce, she moved to Malibu after a decade in New York, to be closer to Bloom.
She felt a little scarred at rst, reluctant to get into another relationship. Then in 2015 she went to a dinner for Louis Vuitton and was seated next to Evan Spiegel, the whizz-kid billionaire who cofounded Snapchat. “You can’t close yourself o from love,” says Miranda. “I try to keep my heart open and not feel afraid.”
She found him “sweet, really kind and smart”, so they went on a date — to Kundalini yoga at Golden Bridge in Santa Monica, favoured by Demi Moore and Madonna. They announced their engagement last July.
She certainly looks as though something, or someone, is making her happy. The reason it works, she says, is because Spiegel is a homebody like her — an old soul. “He’s [26], but he acts like he’s 50,” she says. “He’s not out partying. He goes to work in Venice [Beach, and then] he comes home. We don’t go out. We’d rather be at home and have dinner, then go to bed early.”
So he doesn’t feel like a younger man, then? “Well, in some ways he does,” she says, with a wink. “I’m telling you, I’ve got the best of both worlds!”
“You can’t close yourself off from love. I try to keep my heart open and not feel afraid”