Restoration Hardware opens in the Cotswolds and Australia is next
Restoration Hardware, the retailer loved by celebrities, is opening here, and if its first UK showroom in a billionaires playground is anything to go by, we’re in for a treat.
A lavish, bucolic bacchanal straight out of Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby, the party is firing now. It’s early June, DJ Idris Elba is on the decks with Pete Tong, Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi joining him in the booth, and the sound system is pumping out Kylie’s ‘Padam Padam’ 2023 anthem.
This story appears in the August issue of WISH, out on Friday, August 4 with The Australian.
There’s a huge raised dance floor with a negroni bar on one side and a martini mixology team on the other. Canapés are flowing from a kitchen teeming with chefs.
This isn’t a party in Los Angeles or Miami. We are instead looking over 18th-century English gardener Capability Brown’s landscaped splendour and closely mown ha-has as herds of deer graze in the green and pleasant distance.
Architect John Pawson and former Tory party co-chairman Ben Elliot are admiring Sir John Soane’s mastery of symmetry, scale and light as Regé-Jean Page from Bridgerton, Sydney Sweeney from The White Lotus and Avatar superstar Zoe Saldaña step from fleets of black limos on the gravel apron outside, into the 17th-century pile’s grand entrance.
Welcome to Aynho Park, north Oxfordshire, a handy 15 kilometres from Soho Farmhouse and 32 kilometres from the Daylesford Organic farm shop. The estate, which under its previous owners played host to Jade Jagger’s wedding in 2012 and Noel Gallagher’s 50th birthday in 2017, has been revamped and jet-setted by its new California-based billionaire owners.
The grand house, once Aynhoe Park but now called the Gallery at Aynho Park, takes the name of the quiet village next door.
It has been transformed, at a cost that may be more than £50 million, into an immaculately rendered temple to aspirant taupe and white, its high and airy halls and drawing rooms home to precisely curated exhibitions of cabinets in engineered teak and forged bronze, kayak-sized day beds, smoothly finished tall boys, marble-topped drawers and console tables and section sofas of rich, clean-lined, low-profile modernism.
Instead of bright colours, there are 50 shades of grey and even more variations on white.
This is the first UK outpost of the American cult furniture brand RH, aka Restoration Hardware, which boasts Kylie Jenner, Jessica Alba, Gwyneth Paltrow and Meghan Markle among its celebrity clientele. Its Prado teak coffee table in weathered grey sat between the Duke and Duchess of Sussex and Oprah Winfrey during their 2021 interview.
It also has just been confirmed that Restoration Hardware is going to open in Australia in late 2025, with a store planned on Bay Street in Sydney’s Double Bay. In partnership with developer Fortis, who was behind Neil Perry’s hugely successful Margaret restaurant, the luxury interiors giant will purpose build their first Australian retail concept.
You can’t stay here – it’s essentially a showroom with restaurants.This is an experiential retail concept that monetises the old aristocratic “at home” invitation. Come to RH’s country house crib for a wood-fired truffle pizza at its outdoor Loggia restaurant, a glass of chilled blush on the sunset-adjacent terrace, or to browse the design books in the Soane-dedicated library, and then buy the suite of garden furniture upon which you are sitting, or the famous RH Cloud modular couch that you just admired in one of the bedrooms upstairs – it’s just like the ones Naomi Watts and Kendall Jenner own.
RH has more than 70 of these “galleries” across America, mostly in townhouses or converted warehouses in places where there is established and newly arriving money: Palm Beach, Los Angeles, Manhattan. There are also two jets, the RH One and RH Two, and RH Three, a superyacht sailing the Mediterranean and the Bahamas. And now this house near Banbury, on the edge of the Cotswolds.
Meanwhile, near Kingham, the Daylesford Organic brand’s expansion has seen it move from posh farm and furniture shop to a full-on, campus-style five-star wellness experience with pool, spa and padel (it’s a squash/tennis hybrid) courts. Membership of The Club by Bamford costs from £2250 per annum, plus a £500 joining fee.
And then 32 kilometres south of Aynho there is Estelle Manor at Eynsham, an outlet of blingy Mayfair members club Maison Estelle, owned by Ennismore, the hospitality group behind Gleneagles in Scotland. Its country club concept, decadently reimagined by Kate Hudson’s favourite interior designers, Roman and Williams, is a maximalist adventure in texture and tactility set in a Grade II listed, 1908 neo-Jacobean hall. Membership fees are £3600 per annum, plus £500 joining fee.
Back at Aynho, RH’s American chairman and chief executive Gary Friedman is having lunch, a smoked salmon salad, at the sun-dappled Orangery restaurant, on a comfy banquette that you might like to own one day, talking about John Soane’s genius and Regency-era neo-classicism. The billionaire with a deep tan, good teeth and a new 33-year-old Australian wife called Bella Hunter (they just got married in Ibiza) is 65 years old and wears white jeans and tobacco suede sneakers.
The self-confessed autodidact freely admits that, before he came to Aynho – which he first clocked in an estate agent’s brochure while sitting in the private jet lounge at Luton Airport, before flying in for a viewing by chopper from the heliport at Battersea, obviously – he’d never heard of the Cotswolds, Soane or Capability Brown and had no idea what a ha-ha was. Why would he? Friedman grew up poor in Sonoma, California.
He was not a great student, was expelled from community college and was the kind of person who thought a colour television was a signifier of wealth. He took a job at Gap where he was promoted to store manager by its chief executive, Millard “Mickey” Drexler, soon becoming the youngest regional manager at the company.
After Gap, Friedman was poached by Pottery Barn, which he grew into a billion-dollar home furnishings company. After 14 years, Friedman left to take over Restoration Hardware, a former mum-and-dad home fixer-upper outlet that specialised in boomer-baiting accessories including garden gnomes and hand-cranked pencil sharpeners. In 2001, with the company “on the edge of bankruptcy”, he saw an opportunity for reinvention.
RH channelled the approach of European furniture makers such as the upscale Ligne Roset, Poltrona Frau and B&B Italia, and the influence of work by New Zealand-born British designer Anouska Hempel to go big on Aman Resorts-style space, rigour and restraint. With the help of investment from Warren Buffett, the brand became a cult lifestyle look.
People didn’t just buy one piece at a time but went for the total “Resto” thing in the same way that people in the United Kingdom do, say, Arts and Crafts. It also shunned all in-house social media – RH has no branded Instagram account – and cleverly became the most Instagrammed furniture company in the world. With a valuation of about $US5.86 billion, the RH brand extends to interior design services, hospitality, guest houses and property. So, is Europe next in line for full
RH domination? “Americans aren’t really known for taste,” Friedman says candidly. “All the luxury brands in the world are basically from Europe and the UK. Yes, we had Tiffany, but then the French bought it. What we’re trying to do with RH is something no one’s ever done – to take an American brand that started probably at the base of what I call the luxury mountain and turn it into a genuine American luxury brand. To climb that mountain.”
Britain, he admits, will be a challenge. Particularly, this very specific little Britain of the Cotswolds. Friedman is keen for enlightenment.
The dining-table talk is about the varnishing, zhooshing and smartening up of the already opalescent Cotswolds around Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire, the area’s remarkable transformation from rural to retail, the notion of more brass than muck sloshing around its villages and estates these days, Chelsea tractors far outnumbering Massey Fergusons and country inns that charge Mayfair prices. The way that the Cotswolds is also now “The Cost Loads” or, inevitably, the C***swolds.
The entry level for a weekend bolthole here now sits at about £3 million, but if you really want to impress like-minded locals, you’ll need to spend at least £5 million, say Cotswolds regulars. The pages of Country Life’s recent Cotswolds property special offered its readers, “A six-bedroom Cotswolds stone house on the edge of Little Tew … Rural outlook and within close proximity to Soho House” for £4 million, and Edgeworth Manor in Gloucestershire – baronial, nine bedrooms, with a barrel-vaulted dining room – for £18 million.This is all good news to Friedman, who works on instinct and gut feeling rather than excessive due diligence and extensive research.
He’s a man who, despite spending more than £1 million on Aynho’s staircase alone (complete with a statue of Hercules, multiple wall-mounted intaglios and huge mirrors), plus a further £5 million on antiques and decorative exotica for the house’s interiors, doesn’t really know where his £1 million staircase is, exactly.Someone at the table offers an explanation.
“Basically, the Cotswolds is to London what the Hamptons is to New York.” We all nod in agreement. Certainly, Friedman and his RH team like this idea – the direct, 90-minute drive out of London on the M40, the nearby Oxford airport with its private jet facilities, the abundance of chopper pads on people’s front lawns, are all good for the brand launch.
We reel off the plethora of new openings and happenings in this land of (organic almond) milk and honey-coloured stone and area of outstanding international snooty: in addition to Estelle Manor, there’s the sprawling extension of The Lakes by Yoo waterside residential development and its new Kate Moss-hosted spa over by the pretty village of Lechlade.Then there’s Range Rover House, a car clubhouse for well-heeled, clean-wheeled 4x4 enthusiasts on the Daylesford campus and the recently green-lit plans for a £150 million Norman Foster-designed Mullin Automotive Park at Enstone Airfield, just down the road from the still-growing Soho Farmhouse.
The inflow of money, the free availability of sourdough, scented candles and bottarga-sprinkled salads, the whirl of Sikorsky blades overhead. This new Cotswolds is a weekend escape protectively domed by affluence and achievement that even the British riff-raff can’t spoil.
What has triggered this rampant Hamptonsisation? How come the Americans are suddenly interested in the once quintessentially English “sheep enclosure in rolling hills”, and why are real estate agents now referring to the prime Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire territory as “a brand destination”?
One has to acknowledge the influence of Downton Abbey – village scenes were filmed at Bampton – and Cameron Diaz and Jude Law in the perennially cosy movie The Holiday, parts of which were shot at Cornwell Manor near Chipping Norton in Oxfordshire. Then there’s the success of Clarkson’s Farm (at Chadlington) on Prime Video.The seemingly never-ending influx of A-list residents: the Beckhams, Goldsmiths, Johnsons, Cowells and Camerons, industrial designers Marc Newson and Sir Jony Ive, formerly of Apple.
There’s the celebrated notoriety, stamina and indulgence of the original “Chipping Norton set” (Blur’s Alex James et al), the constant trade and revamping of public houses by blue-chip landlords – Lady Carole Bamford has added to her portfolio with The Fox at Oddington and The Bell at Charlbury, once J.R.R. Tolkien’s favourite boozer.
The locations may be rural, but the speed, ambition and budgets, the menus and lunch cheques and interior design concepts, are all distinctly urban.Not everyone is happy – least of all some residents of Aynho, which dates back to Anglo-Saxon times, who fear a stream of 4WDs roaring through their village all year long.
Indeed, the wave of citification is a problem for anyone not of the Range Rover or chopper classes. As far back as 2015, journalist and author A.A. Gill railed at the Cotswolds’ “desperate slums of snobbery, mired stews of avarice, envy and garden-furniture insecurity”, its “Hades … of urine-coloured stone and twinkly, antiquified retirement” and “the great pursed lips of smugness”.
Eight years on, interior designer Nicky Haslam, who keeps a small manor house at Oddington on the Bamfords’ estate, complains that the food offering in the Cotswolds is “too much like London’s”.
“It’s not what the country’s for, being turned into the town,” he says. “Convenience in the country is what’s wrong. I want to make it more inconvenient, make it wilder.” (Haslam clearly hasn’t heard about the proposed BT-funded Project Skyway, which will create a 265-kilometre drone corridor above Reading, Oxford and Milton Keynes. The United Kingdom’s first drone superhighway, also the largest and longest network of its kind in the world, will facilitate package delivery, making it possible to eat London’s Berkeley Street-prepared sushi on one’s Little Barrington terrace.)
Of course, these glum first world moanings fall on deaf ears and cannot be heard anyway in one’s soundproofed Land Rover Defender XS Edition. John Hitchcox, developer and Range Rover driver, is sitting astride his e-bike and discussing why he is loath to describe his vast, still-growing The Lakes by Yoo property in hack-friendly soundbites.His PR team, he says, has advised him against the use of terms such as “Countryside-lite”, “West London-sur-Lac”, or “Center Parcs for Hedge Funders”.
But as we whizz around the gravelled paths and lakeside dirt tracks, across meadows and among the 500,000 trees planted by Hitchcox’s team, to Simon and Yasmin Le Bon’s new house, past Kay Burley’s immaculately furnished turnkey apartment complete with brand selected coffee-table books and Indonesian objets, designer Philippe Starck’s incredible three-storey, pagoda-roofed construction now nearing completion, the hangar where Jools Holland stashes his classic Bentley, the new marquee restaurant where Natalie Imbruglia just played a private gig, past the Succession meets Swallows and Amazons aesthetic of wood-clad, water-adjacent, £14 million weekend retreats owned by various bankers, sheikhs and Bloomberg sorts, and the art park with its sculptures by Kaws and Yoshitomo Nara, past that Kate Moss-branded spa, the pool house that hosts a massive, multi-screen David Hockney digital work in its lobby, the house the Google team rents for its annual get-together, the idyllic stretch of water where Manchester City’s Phil Foden recently landed a huge pike, it becomes very evident that The Lakes by Yoo might not be, well … for all of you.Hitchcox first came here back in 1999, introduced to the Cotswolds by his friend Matthew Freud (now living in the magnificent Burford Priory, just down the A361).
He had co-founded the successful Manhattan Loft company in the city, and had a hunch that there was a group of well-off, urban-dwelling people who, like him and his young family, wanted somewhere to go and something nice to do on the weekends.
He ruled out anywhere further than 90 minutes from London, and landed on a plot of Gloucestershire farmland, transforming it into a sort of Scandi/Minneapolis wetlands estate/resort project, punctuated with Grand Designs-style prefabricated wooden homes that extend out over fresh water. It took a painful 10 years to get the planning permission through.“Everyone thought I was mad,” Hitchcox says. “They said no one would come.”
He persisted, partnering with Starck on some house concepts and starting small with just a few plots. More than a decade later, The Lakes by Yoo is now 170 houses on 344 hectares with prices ranging from £1.3 million for a cabin to £10 million for a house on a one-hectare plot.
A new project, Cotswolds Waters, will comprise a further 65 hectares, 74 houses and 63 apartments with prices pitched at between £2 million and £6 million. Some of the houses at the Lakes were already designed by the likes of Elle Macpherson and Jade Jagger, suggesting a Lakes at Yoo and RH collaboration is surely in the offing.
Hitchcox explains that his clientele, like RH’s, are “cash-rich, time-poor” banker, family-man types who have scanned Country Life for olde Cotswolds stone properties with leaky roofs, decided they don’t want that and then been delighted to discover that there is a place where all the decorating and fitting out is already done, the heating works and there is a kids’ club and a Pilates studio for the Euro missus.
“Wealthy people don’t just want stuff,” Hitchcox says. “They want a lifestyle and community, safety, security and a sense of wellbeing.” A bit of profit, too – properties here have enjoyed 10 per cent annual growth in the past 20 years.
A recent insurance assessment, Hitchcox tells me, valued the Lakes by Yoo development at £900 million. The raft of new openings signifying the apparently unstoppable rise of the Cotswolds is good for business, he says, smiling.
The Cotswolds weekend finishes with cocktails and dinner over at Estelle Manor, which is geographically convenient to my own modest, three-bedroom semi-Cotswolds stone detached home near Witney.
David Beckham’s best pal, Dave Gardner, and Jessica Simon, daughter of the Accessorize retail tycoon Peter Simon, are sitting at neighbouring tables. Later on this year, the 24-hectare hotel and country club will add Eynsham Baths, a Roman spa with a tepidarium bathing hall (and five pools), to its 108 rooms and suites and four restaurants.
Members will want to disappear in its velvet cushions and bolsters and flattering low-lighting, and stay for a month or two drinking negronis and snacking on haute cuisine dim sum. Estelle’s founder, Sharan Pasricha, says he wants the wowzering design to feel “eclectic and layered … Almost like a well-travelled family friend’s home, comfortable but filled with curiosities and trinkets”.
Who will come? While Soho Farmhouse remains a magnet for millennials and social media influencers, Estelle Manor’s decor and prices mean it will cater instead for multimillionaires and fund managers. Families, too, Pasricha insists.
“These days, many people are either working from home or happy to commute from Oxford to London,” he says. The Covid-19 pandemic period, Pasricha believes, was a major reset moment for the Cotswolds with “formerly urban families making big lifestyle changes and moving out of London to Oxford and the surrounding areas for more space and a more beautiful setting,” he says. “Estelle Manor is for those people.”
