From the archive: how Amanda Brooks decorates her Cotswold farmhouse for Christmas
The writer and shop owner Amanda Brooks is one of those rare people whose personal taste feels totally assured. She is in fact what you might call a tastemaker, whose career trajectory - which straddles both the fashion and design worlds - seems to have been propelled by a magpie-like intuition for spotting the beauty in something before everybody else does.
A former-fashion director of Barneys New York, her roving creative instinct came to roost in the sleepy, honey-coloured Cotswold town of Stow-on-the-Wold, where she originally opened a now-online only shop, selling a mixture of pieces from interesting, independent makers, alongside carefully sourced clothing and antiques.
Cutter Brooks - an amalgamation of her maiden and married names - was a project that came to fruition after Amanda and her husband, the artist Christopher Brooks, took a year-long creative sabbatical in 2012 which turned into a permanent relocation. ‘New York had begun to feel very fast. We had two young children, and I began to crave being less available to work. I wanted to see if it was possible to create a life and career where I could define my own terms. It was a slow process. I consulted for a while after I came here, and wrote two books, but I didn’t take the plunge with the shop until 2018.’
Cutter Brooks was inspired by the life Amanda was living in her new home in the English countryside, the houses she was visiting, the people and artisans she was meeting, and connected to the slow turn of the seasons.
Amanda's approach to festive decorating is a charming amalgamation of European and American nostalgia. The imaginations of Norman Rockwell and Nancy Myers, meets something more folksy, classical and English. Hundreds of hand-made glass ornaments sourced from makers in eastern Europe - ‘I work with very specific places that make them in the original moulds from the Thirties’ - in the shape of every conceivable fruit, vegetable and animal are piled in bowls and hang from trees. There is an army of Santas, and a table laid for Christmas dinner with blously paper Poinsettias by the artist Livia Cetti. ‘Even the paper flowers have to be seasonal here.’
Amanda’s home is now the testing ground for the pieces she stocks. ‘I wouldn’t have anything in the shop that I wouldn’t have in my house, but the joy I used to get finding things for myself, I have now transferred to the shop.’
The family now live on Fairgreen Farm in neighbouring Chipping Norton, where Christopher was born, and where he now manages the land, which is farmed organically for Daylesford. Jeremy Clarkson lives down the road, and Blur’s Alex James is a few fields over.
Fairgreen is still something of a Brooks family compound, with his mother, siblings and their children in other properties dotted around the farm. Christopher had always kept a cottage there, which already had ‘layers of other people’s style’, having been lived in by various friends and family members over the decades.
‘The first time I came to Fairgreen Farm was in 1997. I had just turned 23, and I’d been dating Christopher for about two or three weeks. It was our first holiday together, and he spent the whole time on a tractor. I was like, what am I meant to do?! I was such a city kid. What I ended up doing was teaching myself to cook. I would take one of the old cookbooks down off the shelf and methodically work my way through the whole thing.’
Adapting to country life Amanda found her style and tastes changing. While living in New York, the couple didn’t have the time or energy to change the ancient wallpaper or the squashy ticking-covered sofa which felt tired to Amanda at first, ‘but which I’m now incredibly grateful I didn’t touch.’
Amanda’s layer of decoration now sits harmoniously alongside that of her predecessors. Her contribution is the injection of American comfort and practicality - closets and bookshelves and a new configuration of seating in the living room. A backgammon table - a family heirloom shipped from her parents old house in the Adirondacks - and her collection of art and ceramics.
Her Christmas decorations are disarmingly jolly and just the right amount of kitsch. Next to the tree nods a mechanical fox (‘he either horrifies or delights’), and outside a 10ft Douglas Fir is hung with hundreds of red glass mushrooms in various shapes and sizes, like a scene from a Brothers Grimm fairytale.
‘Christmas for me isn’t about good taste. It’s about having fun. I like to use a lot of natural things, garlands specifically, but I’m also not a snob about fake decorations. I think you should be able to use the same things year after year.’
In the living room bushels of holly and bowls piled with shimmering glass cherries and apples dot the surfaces. These were sourced from third or fourth generation makers, hand-painted and mouth-blown. ‘When I first opened the shop I would search everywhere for vintage ornaments like this because there is something about the softness of the colours that I love.’
Quilted patchwork stockings line the fireplace, and a boyband of Santas in various sizes fill each windowsill on a bed of moss. ‘These are adorable. They’re hollow and you can fill them with candy. They’re wonderful for children's bedrooms. ’
The tree is hung with hundreds of tiny birds, coloured lights (‘only the old fashioned kind - if you can’t find a set with pink in it then forget it’), and the kind of skinny, bead lined gold and silver tinsel most often seen on old Christmas cards. ‘I grew up in the eighties. So that whole look is very nostalgic for me.’
Silka Rittson Thomas the founder of Tuk Tuk Flowers, is a neighbour and friend. Her studio have created a spectacularly bushy garland of greenery over the kitchen windows, and another dotted with glass pomegranates tucked around the mantlepiece.
The garden too is awash with coloured lights, while benches scattered with patterned cushions surround a flower-shaped fire bowl. ‘I wanted to create a beautiful, cozy space outside where my mother in law who is 89 could come and enjoy the tree and the fire without having to worry about the pandemic.’
‘I mean, it sounds ridiculous,’ she says. ‘But just to be in the perfect expression of your taste and style is very satisfying.’