_Country View 2020: Border life with the Bremners
Below is an abridged version of Rory Bremner and Tessa Campbell Fraser's interview with Knight Frank for this year's Country View, reflecting on their labour of love property on the Scottish Borders which is now for sale through Knight Frank's Melrose office. Read the full interview in Country View, Knight Frank’s definitive guide to the finest country property from across the UK, on p.11.
“I never did realise my dream of going up there and writing my book,” muses with a touch of sadness, one of Britain’s best-loved impressionists and satirists, Rory Bremner. We’ve joined Bremner and wife Tessa Campbell Fraser in their new country house in Oxfordshire to talk about country living, and specifically the life they created for themselves on the Scottish borders. “But we had everything else there. It’s the perfect family house in every way.”
Bremner and Campbell Fraser, a renowned sculptor and artist began the morning with Knight Frank keenly talking through visions of domestic bliss for their home in the Oxfordshire hills, but it’s talk of their former family home – a two-year labour of love and endeavour to create the quintessential family nest – that is the reason the Bremner-Campbell-Frasers have welcomed us into their home.
“It was somewhere where we could relax and escape to properly for ten to 12 weeks of the year,” Campbell Fraser continues softly. “It was somewhere you could step off the conveyor belt of life and enjoy as a family.”
The subject of their affections, Crailing House near Jedburgh on the Scottish Borders, is finally up for sale through Knight Frank’s Melrose office, and it’s a decision that has clearly been a wrench for both Bremner and Campbell Fraser. The couple talk fondly of the environment they created for the family, an interview where a nostalgic back-and-forth almost eulogises the dream they built together.
Above: Crailing House
They bought the ten-bedroom, three-bathroom Regency-style house, set across grounds of 15.23 acres, in 2009, which at the time was uninhabitable. Two years’ toil modernised the main manor house (they swapped out the old oil boiler for a high-tech environmentally friendly biomass boiler and remapped the internal plumbing for example) and restored both interior and exterior elements to their former resplendence (Formica sheeting in the kitchen gave way to beautiful pine panelling). They also reduced the number of bedrooms to seven and added two more bathrooms.
The aim of their project was simple: to reap the mutual rewards of careers in the arts and to channel their energies into creating a new, wholesome lifestyle for young daughters Ava, 18, and Lila, 16, who were seven and five respectively at the time.
Nine happy years later, work and the pursuit of it would bring the family back down to the south of England, the family have moved back to the Cotswolds, so both can balance the demands of work and the girls’ education. The current dwelling, a 19th century former priory is undergoing renovations of its own. Did Crailing cause them to catch the bug, as it were? “Oh lord no,” Campbell Fraser says defiantly. “I mean, I am the eternal gypsy and will always like the idea of moving, but that work was enough for one lifetime.”
Read the full interview in Country View 2020, p.11.