Country Affair

Farm girl-turned-fashion designer Alice Temperley opens the doors of her English mansion to reveal a haven of bohemian style.

- Chloe Street

"I believe that as a child I didn’t know it was there,” says the British fashion designer Alice Temperley of Cricket Court, a heritage-listed Regency mansion that’s been her country home since 2010. Set on six hectares in the quintessentially English rural landscape “I can’t of Ilminster, Somerset, the house is just 13 kilometres from the cider farm on which she and her siblings, Mary, Mathilda and Harry, grew up, and yet Alice spent her childhood completely unaware of its existence. “Weirdly, we knew every inch of the moors on the other side of the house,” she says, “but because it’s quite hilly and undulating, there are little pockets you just don’t discover.”

After an idyllic childhood spent picking apples and helping with the lambing season (“we all had matted hair and rode horses bareback through the middle of nowhere”), Alice left Somerset to study fashion design at the Royal College of Art and Central St Martins in London. In 2000, a year after graduating, she launched her eponymous label with boyfriend Lars von Bennigsen. Now, 17 years on, Alice—who split from Lars in 2012 and lives with their nine-year-old son, Fox—sits at the helm of a major international player in women’s luxury ready-to-wear, bridal and couture. Temperley London is one of the three top-selling brands on Moda Operandi, has five standalone stores (two in London, plus one each in Los Angeles, Dubai and Doha) and is distributed in more than 30 countries. A hugely successful bridal range was launched in 2007, and a more affordable range launched in partnership with British retailer John Lewis in 2012, Somerset by Alice Temperley, became the fastest-selling fashion collection in the department store’s history.