When discussing creative life in the English countryside, Somerset is often on everyone’s lips. Bruton has become its own cultural orbit, with galleries, exhibitions, and events such as the recent Big Brue festival at Hauser & Wirth. Meanwhile, the surrounding villages are dotted with destination restaurants, including Osip, a farm-to-table restaurant, Holm, and Margot Henderson’s Three Horseshoes. Glastonbury has been drawing the spiritually curious for centuries, while its namesake music festival attracts hundreds of thousands each summer. And then there is the wellness scene—an increasingly dense network of yoga teachers, holistic healers, and therapists who seem to materialize wherever there is an old barn and a good view. Into this fertile landscape comes Winterbourne, an 18th-century Strawberry Hill Gothic rectory that is equal parts country house and wellness retreat.
In 2018, Geordie Greig, the former editor of Tatler and the Daily Mail, and now the editor of The Independent, bought the house with his wife Kathryn, a seventh-generation Texan with a background at Sotheby’s. Kathryn spotted the property in Country Life while on holiday in Jamaica. It checked two important boxes: it was an easy journey from Paddington and didn’t involve the traffic-filled M4. What began as a plan for a weekend escape from Notting Hill became, over the course of a four-and-a-half-year restoration, something considerably more ambitious.