There were moments when Adriaan Koppens doubted the wisdom of restoring a rundown farm in Herefordshire. Winter nights were the worst as gales whistled down from the Welsh mountains and branches rattled against the caravan where he sheltered during the project. But the next day, when the clouds lifted, revealing frosted hawthorns and sheep-speckled fields, Koppens remembered why he and his partner, Stéphane Girod, an economist, had chosen to leave London: “This is a special place. Because it’s been isolated for centuries it still feels unspoilt, not overgentrified.”
Trading city comforts for the Welsh borders was never going to be easy. But Koppens, a Dutch-born art historian, had taken on a particular challenge. The 18th-century house and its ramshackle outbuildings needed a new lease of life. So did the surrounding landscape: the softly spoken Koppens becomes animated when he reveals how he has gradually transformed the 70-acre setting, near Hay-on-Wye. “We’ve planted over 6,500 trees with the Forestry Commission, and repaired the hedgerows. It’s been rewarding to see wildlife returning: kites, pine martens, buzzards. In spring you can hear cuckoos, which is rare now.”
Koppens, who has devoted years to studying “nature and building”, also took a conservationist’s approach to the house. “I’ve always admired the way the British restore old buildings. There’s a respect for materials and the patina of age. It’s very different to, say, in Germany, where everything has to look spick and span.” Inside, damp-ridden walls were painstakingly rebuilt by local stonemasons. Instead of leaving them modishly bare, Koppens used traditional limewash, in upbeat pink or green based on original colours discovered beneath the sandwich of wallpaper. “The lime is coloured with natural pigments which allows the stone to breathe,” he explains.
Authenticity also stretches to the new oak beams, joined with pegs – not screws, and the original flagstones gently lifted and levered back in over underfloor heating. A new hand-forged balustrade glides upstairs to the bedrooms. In the boot room, where guests swap wellies for slippers, excavation revealed the original bread oven. “For centuries these houses were self-sufficient; they baked bread, reared their own meat, grew their own vegetables.” Koppens admits that his own produce only stretches to a decorative herb garden, “but at least we buy our food locally”.
While the architecture is local the decoration fuses urban sensibilities. “I lean towards a minimalist style,” muses Koppens, a former lecturer at Birkbeck College in London. “But Stéphane’s passion is for French 18th-century design. It’s an interesting dynamic.” You might think that a Louis XV console gleaming next to a Philippe Starck chair or the Ingo Maurer Campari light (“everyone thinks I made it myself”) would look wildly out of kilter in a stone-walled farmstead. But the mix works. “You can combine almost anything, as long as the pieces have integrity.” There is more evidence of divergent tastes in the converted barn, where shelves are lined with books on economics and art history. The music stand is where Koppens practises the recorder; the strains of Telemann drifting towards the old hayloft: “The acoustics are great.”
He traces artistic leanings back to his grandfather, Ari Visser, an artist who painted the naive artwork in the sitting room. “The joyfulness of his religious art was an escape from the strict Calvinism of Holland. My appreciation of art comes from him. It was my protest against the suburbia of Amsterdam where I grew up. I’ve been rebelling ever since.”
Koppens’s uncle, Geert Jan Visser, was a prescient art collector: part of his collection is now in the Kröller-Müller museum near Amsterdam. One of his paintings hangs in the barn where paying guests stay. Suppers are served in the barn of the neighbouring farm; a sauna is housed in an industrial-look building. In summer, you find visiting writers from the Hay Festival breakfasting on terraces or stargazing into the black skies at night.
They might also catch a glimpse of Corsaire, the French bulldog. “He settled in immediately, tearing into the fields.” But rural communities take years to form and Koppens has no illusions that it will take time for a pair of European academics to shrug off their incomer status and be fully accepted. In the meantime he has traded the city saloon for a 4x4 and trainers for sensible boots. But he has no plans to don tweeds: “I’m not a country squire,” he smiles.
