Edie Campbell Takes Us to Her Northamptonshire Home for British Vogue October 2021

Esteemed model and industry advocate Edie Campbell appears with her mum Sophie Hicks in ‘Campbell’s Stoop’, a look at Edie’s new home. Photographer Simon Watson [IG] visits the Northamptonshire rebuild between two lakes, capturing the work of architect Hickks and her daughter client for British Vogue October 2021./ Hair by Alfie Sackett; makeup by Ciara O’Shea

The 30-year-old model’s mum Sophie Hicks is a former British Vogue fashion editor, who has built stores for Chloé and Paul Smith, and homes for the Le Bon family.

“Mum is full of opinions,” Edie laughs, affectionately telling Ellie Pithers in the interview. “But I know what I like, and I don’t flip-flop, and that was good for her. She just wanted me to know what I wanted, and then she could enact it.” Sophie, for her part, describes her daughter as the perfect client. “Edie was very good to work for because she is very decisive. Once she’s made up her mind, that’s it. It makes life so much more efficient.”

Campbell acquired the East Midlands property in May 2018. She had an existing fondness for the “understated, underrated country” acquired in countless family summer stays in the area. With a dozen places in her property-viewing experience Edie was immediately taken with the fishery surrounded by farmland.

“It had a nice energy, it was very quiet,” she says. And it had space for stables and paddocks for her horses. The house became a sanctuary for Edie and girlfriend Hanna, Campbell suffered a serious brain injury in May 2019, after falling from her horse in Brain Injury Awareness Week. It was — Campbell notes — “perfect timing.” Edie was in recovery for six months and has returned to competing, noting that she is very forgetful.

Campbell was adamant that the new house feel “in some way, of its world.”

“Obviously, it’s very different to the other residential buildings around here,” she says. “But I also don’t think you can build a brand-new ‘ye olde stone cottage’. That looks weird, too.”

“Everybody lives and feels a place in a different way,” says Hicks. “The thing with architecture is to understand the character and the behaviour of the people you’re working for, so you can try and do something for them that makes them feel comfortable.” What Edie detailed – a desire for openness rather than cosiness, a sense of flow between inside and outside, to be able to occasionally see her horses from a distance – ended up being a manifesto. “She was adamant about the fact that she didn’t want a ‘designer’ house,” recalls Sophie. “And I don’t like statement architecture either. I like things to be discreet and a bit restrained, to settle into their position and use a bit of local vernacular. So I totally got what she was saying.”

Related: A New Book from a Renowned Photographer of Interiors T: The New York Times Style Magazine Aug. 2020