It’s ‘rotting, slightly falling down’ and full of knick-knacks from mummy’s posh store
IT is ‘slightly falling down’ and ‘rotting’ – but to Samantha Cameron it is her sanctuary.
The idyllic Cotswolds country home she shares with former Prime Minister David Cameron and their children is her ‘family nest’.
Now Mrs Cameron has opened its doors to the glossy magazine Harper’s Bazaar.
Many furnishings in the home come from OKA, the British furniture retailer founded in 1999 by Mrs Cameron’s mother Annabel Astor. The firm has 14 UK stores together with British, European and American websites and a catalogue business.
With its earthy hues – complemented by soot marks above the fireplace and an abundance of scatter cushions – the cottage looks like the perfect place to ‘chillax’. And the sofa with the faux-fur throw, next to the 40-inch television, is exactly where Mr Cameron is said to stretch out to unwind and read books including the spoof Enid Blyton novel Five on Brexit Island. The Camerons bought the Cotswold cottage in 2001 when he became MP for Witney, Oxfordshire. They paid £650,000 for their constituency home, but it became so precious they kept it on after he stepped down as an MP last year. It is now worth about £1.5million. Mrs Cameron told Harper’s Bazaar: ‘To be honest, the house is slightly falling down.
‘The windows are rotting, the roof needs replacing, but it’s lovely and it’s where we brought each of our children home from the hospital. It’s our family nest.’ The Camerons’ children Nancy, 13, Elwen, 11, and Florence, six, all love spending weekends at the cottage.
Its kitchen is so comfortable, that a relaxed Mr Cameron let slip in a 2015 BBC interview filmed in the room that he would not seek a third term as Prime Minister. Mrs Cameron, who has turned fashion designer, has not missed the opportunity of a magazine spread to showcase her own clothes range, Cefinn. Portraits show her drinking tea in the garden wearing a £210 texture voile blouse. She tells the magazine: ‘I wanted to be an artist or a designer from an early age.’
In 2010, when she was pregnant with Florence, and with her husband running for PM, she resigned as creative director of upmarket stationers Smythson to work two days a week.
With more spare time she took pattern-cutting lessons in No 10’s dining room.
Mrs Cameron, 46, tells Bazaar that the bold navy-and-orange dress she wore when her husband quit Downing Street after losing the Brexit vote was her ‘winning’ outfit. She said: ‘I’d actually bought it for winning the election because it was upbeat, along with another for losing, but I ended up wearing the wrong one.’
The full interview appears in the September issue of Harper’s Bazaar, on sale August 4.