Begin Again

At 30, Cara Delevingne is reckoning with a life lived close to the edge. She opens up to Chioma Nnadi about slowing down, taking care of herself, and where she goes from here.

- By Chioma Nnadi. Photographed by Annie Leibovitz

Conceived as a playhouse for adults, Cara Delevingne’s 1940s white-brick home in Los Angeles is the stuff of design-world lore. It brims with madcap furnishings, each corner appointed with her signature wit and imagination. There’s a tented poker room draped in red velvet, a David Bowie–themed bathroom, a ball pit with circus-stripe walls, trampolines laid into the lawn.

When I arrive at the big blue front doors on a cloudless day in late January, Delevingne greets me with a warm hug. She has the gawky charm of a teenage music nerd—barefoot and dressed in an oversized vintage Prince T-shirt matched with gray marl gym shorts—and ushers me quickly past the crystal clear baby grand piano and the glowing James Turrell art installation up to the den on the first floor. If each room reflects a side of her personality, then this space suggests Delevingne at her most introspective. Decorated with little more than a few graphic Bowie concert posters, it’s the one room where the famously kinetic British model and actor might occasionally sit still. “Did you feel the earthquake last night?” she asks, referring to the 4.2 magnitude shock waves that struck off the coast of Malibu in the early hours of the morning. I confess I slept through it, and I’m surprised that she didn’t as well. Could anything rock the foundations of this fantastical bachelorette pad? “They don’t really scare me much,” she says dryly, of earthquakes, sinking her gangly limbs into the sofa and curling up with her dogs— one a Pomeranian husky named Leo, the other a Chihuahua terrier called Alfie. “I guess I’m just always ready for the ground to fall beneath my feet.”