It’s a glorious spring afternoon and I’m sitting in the vast, impeccably tasteful Cotswolds farmhouse kitchen of U.S. Vogue journalist and social commentator Plum Sykes, admiring the heart-stopping views over a verdant Gloucestershire valley, its fields divided by drystone walls and hawthorn hedges, with not another house in sight.
Two border terriers snooze in yellow velvet armchairs in front of the fireplace. Plum, who’s 54 and 5 ft 11 in, is dressed in ‘what I wear every day in the country, unless I’m riding’ — a brown Uniqlo merino jumper, Frame skinny jeans and Geox trainers — and is skinnier than a straw.
‘I’m one of those people who just has the metabolism of a horse, so you’d think I could eat as many cakes as I like, but I can’t because I have cholesterol!’ she says in her cut-glass tones.
She may have made her name as a writer Stateside, but Plum — real name Victoria — was born and bred in Sevenoaks, Kent.
She’s whipping up a ‘little salad’ consisting of avocadoes, tomatoes and mozzarella, accompanied by smoked salmon and Parma ham and still warm nut-filled bread from Jolly Nice in nearby Stroud. ‘It’s the ‘in’ farm shop.’
U.S. Vogue journalist and social commentator Plum Sykes has just published a new novel, Wives Like Us, which is causing huge excitement among her super-rich neighbours
David and Victoria Beckham have a £12 million second home in the Cotswolds
As she briskly chops tomatoes, she chats about her neighbours.
‘Lily Allen used to live nearby, her father Keith’s in Stroud. [Author] Ian McEwan lives over there and Jilly Cooper’s just there, she’s my icon. She’s in her 80s, but incredibly active and fit and extremely beautiful with that peachy skin and amazing hair.
‘She’s been here a few times for dinner. She always says, ‘Well, I’ll just come for an hour,’ and then she’s the one with the champagne, holding court and always talking about sex, but not sleazily, in the funniest Sloane Ranger way: ‘Why don’t men like bonking any more?’ I think, ‘Oh God, I don’t know what to say!’
Yet it may finally be time for Jilly to make way for a new chronicler of Cotswolds life. For Plum, once described by Vogue’s editor-in-chief Anna Wintour as ‘the quintessential Vogue girl’, has just published a new novel, Wives Like Us, which is causing huge excitement among her super-rich neighbours, as they try to deduce who in their glossy posse is based on who in this roman à clef.
‘I’ve heard everyone’s in a complete tizzy about it,’ Plum confirms gleefully.
The novel spotlights how, in the 11 years since Plum moved here, this formerly idyllic, but dozy, slice of Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire has transformed into a billionaire’s playground, up there with such hotspots as the Hamptons, Mykonos and St Tropez.
Those who’ve made their (second) homes in this area of outstanding natural beauty, situated conveniently just two hours down the motorway from West London, include the Beckhams, Foreign Secretary Lord Cameron and his designer wife Samantha, film producer Jemima Khan (‘She throws the best parties,’ Plum asserts), Princess Marie Chantal of Greece and Blur bassist Alex James who now runs a cheese farm.
Locals think nothing of spotting Elizabeth Hurley queuing for a £9.99 ‘Good Life’ loaf in Carole, Baroness Bamford’s Daylesford Organic shop in Moreton-in-Marsh. ‘The food’s as good, if not better, than London there,’ Plum says.
Kate Moss may be sighted perusing the homewares in Cutter Brooks in Stow-on-the-Wold, run by Amanda Brooks, former fashion director for ultra-hip New York department store Barneys, where a single hand-embroidered napkin costs £20.
Unofficial monarchs, of course, are Jeremy Clarkson and his partner Lisa Hogan, whose ratings-winning antics on Amazon Prime’s Clarkson’s Farm have lured thousands of pilgrims to their Diddly Squat Farm Shop, much to the displeasure of West Oxfordshire County Council.
Former prime minister David Cameron sits on the steps of a luxury cabin he has installed in his Cotswolds garden
Jeremy Clarkson and his partner Lisa Hogan, whose ratings-winning antics on Amazon Prime’s Clarkson’s Farm have lured thousands of pilgrims to their Diddly Squat Farm Shop
‘Apparently Harry Styles is trying to buy something,’ Plum adds. ‘But he might be hard pressed to find it. All the Americans want to buy here now and there’s only so many mansions with 50 or 100 acres, so if you want one, somebody’s already going to be living there. It means properties like that are selling for around £10 million.’
Early fears that the countryside might be too, well, rural were long allayed after private members club Soho Farmhouse — offshoot of London media luvvie mothership Soho House — opened nine years ago.
Since then, wealthy incomers have, Plum says, simply ‘refashioned the countryside into an existence that suits them. They’ve taken all the social intensity of London or New York or Paris, wherever they’ve come from, and all the pleasures — the tennis clubs, the padel tennis courts, the clothes shops, amazing things to eat, and made a little microcosm here.’
‘Everyone has to buy their own pub so they have somewhere nice to go to,’ Plum jokes. ‘[PR supremo] Matthew Freud moved to Burford — which is where I used to go to buy sweeties and maybe a wicker basket from the tourist shops — and opened a hotel with a really expensive Japanese restaurant in the basement.
Ten years ago no one round here would have wanted sushi, now it’s raw fish dinners for the local farmers,’ Plum’s huge brown eyes sparkle with amusement.
As an author who has written three previous comic satires — Bergdorf Blondes and The Debutante Divorceé about Manhattan ‘Park Avenue princesses’, and Party Girls Die In Pearls about Oxford students in Boris Johnson’s Bullingdon Club heyday — the temptation to send up this new, blingy phenomenon was irresistible. ‘I couldn’t believe no one had written about it before!’ she exclaims.
We meet before the book’s been published, but Plum tells me happily there’s already a waiting list for copies at bookshops in Notting Hill, where most Cotswolds types own London residences, and in the local bookshop in Chipping Norton.
Hardly surprising since Plum’s always been bang on the zeitgeist. One of six children of art dealer Mark, the grandson of a baronet, and fashion designer Valerie Goad, she grew up with her twin sister Lucy, posh but poor, on her grandmother’s farm in Kent. ‘My parents were very hands-off.’
S he studied history at Oxford, then worked at British Vogue, before being hired by Wintour and moving to New York.
She was the toast of Manhattan, during its Sex And The City heyday, although she never watched the show. ‘I was too busy being Carrie Bradshaw to watch Carrie Bradshaw,’ she laughs.
What was Wintour, immortalised as the boss from hell in the novel and film The Devil Wears Prada, like to work for? ‘Amazing. You always know exactly where you stand with her.’
Blur bassist Alex James now runs a cheese farm in his Cotswolds home
Kate Moss pictured outside her local pub in the Cotswolds
In 2005, Plum married British businessman Toby Rowland, son of controversial tycoon ‘Tiny’ Rowland. The couple returned from New York and settled in London, but quickly resolved to move out after their daughters Ursula, now 17, and Tess, 13, were born. ‘I really couldn’t imagine bringing up kids in London.’
In her early days at British Vogue she’d worked for mega-stylist Isabella Blow, who had a house in Gloucestershire, so initially the couple rented a weekend cottage from Blow’s husband Detmar. ‘The area was very groovy, Cath Kidston had a house here, so did [milliner] Philip Treacy and we fell in love with it.’
After much searching, they bought a Victorian wreck, with 100 acres of land, outbuildings and stables where three magnificent horses now chomp on hay. To the original, chilly farmhouse, they added a main wing, containing eight bedrooms and a warren of dauntingly stylish living rooms replete with olde worlde beamed ceilings, oak floors, carved fireplaces and a buttery-stoned facade.
‘But it’s all completely fake!’ Plum exclaims. ‘It’s a stone front over concrete breeze blocks, so it’s insulated, double-glazed, warm. It’s very glamorous but very practical.’
She shows me her hot tub hidden in a corner of the pretty, but not crazily manicured, garden. ‘So ugly, not very chic, but amazing to sit in.’
She’s since divorced from Toby, but kept the house, where for the past decade she’s led a lowish-key existence: writing, riding her horses and hunting. (‘I know it’s politically incorrect, but I don’t care.’)
Gradually, Plum became aware that while hers was still the ‘bohemian’ end of the Cotswolds, on the eastern, Oxfordshire, side of the A40 everything had become ‘super-glamorous, media, celebrity. Covid changed things completely, that’s when everyone decided to move out of London for good.’
Now Plum makes frequent 50-minute drives into this schmancy world to monitor the shenanigans of her novel’s ‘country princesses’, the exceedingly spoiled and somewhat insecure wives of Plum’s novel, whose banker, lawyer and tech entrepreneur husbands work four-day weeks in London, in order to fund their spouses’ ‘vocation as modern Ladies of the Manor’.
‘They’re princesses because they’re not going to get muddy. They’re not going to dig up the garden. They’re not going to muck out the stables. But they still want that bucolic feeling,’ Plum explains.
To that end, armies of staff harvest these women’s organic kale, groom their ponies and collect their children from their pricey schools.
Meanwhile, the wives busy themselves vying to book the most in-demand ‘tablescaper’ —that’s a professional who, for several thousand pounds a pop, will lay your table so it looks pretty on Instagram — and attend village fetes where donkey rides are out, helicopter rides are in and the Women’s Institute cake stall has been replaced by stalls selling rosewater madeleines.
To unwind from such stressful activities, they congregate in the local health clubs — such as Estelle Manor in Eynsham, sister of Mayfair private member’s club Maison Estelle, with its network of thermal Roman baths.
But now everyone’s most excited about The Club by Bamford, where membership starts at £2,250 a year (plus £750 joining fee) and which, Plum tells me, ‘has a swimming pool lined with silver leaf that puts ions in the water that are incredibly good for you. One friend told me she showers there every day, because it’s so much nicer than her shower at home.’
Most local gossip about Plum’s novel centres around the identity of the wives. There’s nouveau-riche Tata, who’s always overdressed in platform-heeled gold sandals and diamonds (‘You see a lot of women like that with all the riding gear who fall off their horses, aspiring to be an aristocratic lady’).
Then there’s mega-glam half-Venezuelan half-Swedish Fernanda and classy, but insecure, English rose Sophie, who’s married to an ‘odious’ Tory MP. ‘Someone said to me, ‘That must be Samantha Cameron.’ I said, ‘Have you met Samantha? I don’t think so!’ ‘
‘A while ago a couple of copies got into micro-circulation and everyone started teasing each other about whether their friends were the characters, then the next thing I heard, everyone had a disease called main-characteritis where they all think they’re the main character,’ Plum says with a hoot of laughter.
‘I don’t know if they liked it or were worried about that, but I just think I’ve obviously done a good job of making it seem really real. But the truth is all the characters are just archetypes of the women who live over there.’
N ow Plum’s planning a series of novels, with the next called Husbands Like Them. ‘All the husbands round here are very competitive about not ageing, they play padel all the time to try to get really fit and have tennis and cricket matches and golf tournaments — it’s a whole other world.’
She’s already nailed one character. ‘I went to a lunch yesterday at the house of a hedge-fund guy in the Oxfordshire side, where everything was very glamorous, very laid on. You could tell the host was really a very straight City guy, but he was wearing Tibetan prayer bracelets and a load of silver bangles. I was like, ‘You are a pretend hippy banker from a book!’
After that she’ll write Kids Like Theirs. It’s a clever strategy, only blighted by the fear of the nouveau hordes encroaching into Plum’s (relatively) untouched corner of paradise.
‘As Oxfordshire gets more and more expensive, it’s inevitable,’ she sighs in mock exasperation. Apparently, all the really chic Gloucestershire people are now planning to escape further westwards into Somerset, Dorset, even Cornwall. If Plum decides to join them, you can bet new Japanese restaurants and spas will follow within months, while another juicy novel will find its inspiration.
Wives Like Us by Plum Sykes (£18.99, Bloomsbury) is out May 14.