Maybe we're slowly preparing for the apocalypse. Perhaps we're all just hell-bent on feeling more grounded in a world that's often a little too loud and lofty. Whatever the reason, the appeal of country living is on the rise for fashion arbiters and it's a major shift in values.
The notion of getting away for the holidays has long been treasured by style's elite, but the idea of regularly escaping to one's country digs is increasingly popular. Instagram photos of Zac Posen savouring farm life in Pleasant Valley, Pa. and tales of Proenza Schouler's Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez revamping their 1792 colonial farmhouse in the Berkshires have been enough to inspire diehard fashionistas to trade in their designer footwear for a pair of Aigle rubber boots. A friend of mine, the famous New York publicist Kelly Cutrone, bought an eight-acre farm in Cold Spring, about 53 miles from New York City in the Hudson Valley, just after she became a TV personality and started making "money money," as she puts it, on MTV's The Hills.
"I was making more money than I needed to live in New York, so I thought, 'What am I going to do with it all? Buy a load of Azzedine Alaia boots at Jeffrey?' " she laughs. Instead, she decided, "I'm going to invest this money and buy a house!"
As a single mother with a young daughter to raise, Cutrone has come to regard her 1910 English colonial home as a kind of anchor. Besides gardening and caring for two alpacas, 10 goats, 10 chickens, two donkeys and two horses, she loves entertaining at her country home. This New Year's Eve, she will throw her traditional bash there, under a pair of white tents.
"I go to all the restaurants for my job. I go to all the cities for my work," she says. "At the end of the day, I'd never go to a place like St. Kitts and be in a place full of New Yorkers! I find my farm life comforting. It gives me an air of normalcy."
As someone who has owned a farm for the past 14 years, I totally get it. Beyond being the sanctuary of my dreams, my stone farmhouse in Ontario's Northumberland County is emblematic of everything I've worked for season in and season out. It has nothing to do with getting dressed up or being on or living up to expectations. It's about cherished moments with loved ones, light years away from designer dramas and professional pressures.
As my daughters were growing up, cozying up at our old cottage for the holidays had always been a way of life for us. I'll never forget the Christmas we headed out to Muskoka with a sack full of wrapped presents strapped to the roof of our SUV. Somewhere along Highway 400, the bungee cords gave out and the gifts went flying. We pulled off to the side of the road and my husband dodged traffic trying to salvage Santa's surprises.
When my marriage ended and the cottage stayed with my ex, I was eager to find another country property for my girls and me. But because I didn't want to be haunted by nostalgic memories of cottage life, I decided to refocus on the pastoral pleasures of a farm. And so, in 2000, I found Chanteclair, an enchanting 123 acres comprised of dreamy meadows and fields of corn, alfalfa and soybeans (I give neighbouring farmers 70 acres to work, mostly because I love the look and feel of land put to good use).
The little stone house, built in 1842, is the piece de résistance.
While I have tried to spend as much downtime there as possible over the years, the question of logistics always reared its head, so it was often difficult to spend the Christmas holidays and New Year's Eve there together as a family. Happily for me, my daughter Bekky and her husband, Keith, fell in love with the farm this past spring and decided to spend a good chunk of their summer there. They got industrious and, by the end of August, had cleared out the old stone foundation where the barn used to be and built an outdoor cob oven in the space. Bekky started making pickles, Keith started researching how to stock the pond with fish and now they're talking about moving to Chanteclair full-time once school ends in a couple of years. If there's a sure sign that farm life is catching on, this is it.
This story originally appeared in the November 2014 issue of Globe Style Advisor. To download the magazine's free iPad app, visit tgam.ca/styleadvisor.