‘It’s ineffably and immaculately posh – and all the more so for being studiously shabby’
A ROSY glow has always surrounded David Cameron; while he was in Downing Street, the public had the impression of an intensely enviable home life, without being quite able to put their finger on what was so very desirable about it – beyond the perfect wife, of course.
We saw the glossy, newly-installed Downing Street kitchen, but that looked like an advertisement for the white goods section of John Lewis. In the glare of media attention, where Mrs May’s wrong (leather) trousers can all but finish a career, the Camerons’ domestic tastes had to be hidden from the electorate’s gaze. Now their Oxfordshire homestead has been shared with the readers of a glossy magazine. It’s ineffably and immaculately posh – and all the more so for being studiously shabby.
The house itself is downplayed – whether by the Camerons or the journalist – as being a cottage. Some cottage! It’s really a good-sized, L-shaped house, smothered in old-fashioned roses – though not architecturally pretentious, and with window frames that need a lick of paint. (If you’re posh, you can get away with it.) Marie-antoinette used to play at being a shepherdess in her specially built hameau at Versailles, and Sam Cam places herself in the same tradition; she’s shown shoeless, sitting in the doorway of a shepherd’s hut.
We’re invited into the sitting room (or drawing room if that didn’t sound too formal in this age of chillaxing.) With beige walls, beige sofas and woven jute-matted floor, there’s a strong feeling of Oka about it – Oka being the furniture company set up by Samantha Cameron’s mother, Lady Astor, the Johnnie Boden of soft furnishing. But while one suspects that the upholstery isn’t threadbare or marked by cigarette burns, because the sofas look quite new, the impression is artfully given that they might be: note the throws.
On the walls, the paintings are eclectic and well-chosen (Sam did go to art school after all). They include two academic nudes, unframed, which could have been painted in this country near the beginning of the 20th century – Modern British, as it’s called in the salerooms, is coming into vogue among collectors who don’t care for the excesses of Contemporary.
Behind the TV (quite modestly sized by today’s standards) is a portrait of Benjamin Disraeli, with what seems to be a French 18th-century girl’s head above it. Over the fireplace is a study of roses, the sort blooming prodigiously outside. It hangs beneath a festoon of pink lights, looking as though it’s been strung together from bubbles blown from bubblegum.
The real fascination, though, is provided by the walls and fireplace. They’re heavily soot-stained, both from a smoky fire and the two stout candles. In Keeping Up Appearances, Hyacinth Bucket would have been horrified to expose such grubbiness, but people as posh as the Camerons don’t care; the blind in the window has fallen down, too – unless it’s a new kind that comes up from the bottom of the window to stop passers-by looking in.
I can’t wait to see how the Camerons do their new town house in Notting Hill, and whether that will also be called a cottage. They bought it for £16 million.