Inside a wildly creative Oxfordshire family home
T here can be few settings as alluringly and authentically idyllic as the family home of the Buchanans, nestled in deepest Oxfordshire yet just a 90-minute drive from London. Brigette, 69, and Robin, 79, have cultivated a well of creativity for their three grown-up children — Angus, who along with his wife, Charlotte, both 39, founded the interior and design practice Buchanan Studio; Violet, 37, a creative consultant; and Maudie, 32, a landscape gardener who lives nearby — who still regularly return to draw from its source.
The Buchanans' converted stable block home is in the grounds of, to quote Angus, 'this incredible, rambling, mad, eccentric house' — an Edwardian building located 100 metres down the road where he and his sisters grew up. Angus remembers making dens in the grounds and the old cars, as well as the animals that were sometimes kept there. In 2016, on realising the stables' potential as a place to downsize to and live more laterally, his parents sold the main house and embarked on an ambitious renovation. 'The garden was 10ft high with brambles and you couldn't walk through it, so we never knew there would be a view going across the fields and the river,' he recalls.
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