Weekend Meanderings No. 127 | A Painter at 91, Ina and Sofia, and a Rectory in the Cotswolds

A painter who found her audience in her seventies, champagne at Ina’s kitchen table, and a short film about what stays unfinished

Good morning, friends. Fall arrived on the calendar this week, and I was dancing a jig. Not literally, but in my mind. After a few days of much needed rain the weather has been beautiful, with cool mornings and evenings and sunny afternoons. The first weekend of fall always makes me want a slow Saturday at home, a second cup, and other people’s houses on the screen, which is more or less what Weekend Meanderings is for. This morning, though, I am off to an art exhibit, then lunch with a friend, and after that, who knows.

This week is full of women living on their own terms. A painter who found her audience in her seventies. A historian who has spent forty years layering an old rectory. And a short film about the things in life that never get wrapped up neatly. Kim, Juliet and I have lots to share, so let’s meander.

Royse Wylie A Painter at 91

If you have ever wondered whether it is too late to go back to the thing you set aside, meet Rose Wylie. She put down her brushes to raise her three children, picked them back up in middle age, and the art world did not really notice her until she was in her seventies. Recently, she filled the main galleries of the Royal Academy in London, the first British woman artist ever to do so.

She has called the same house in Kent home for 58 years, and it may be the least tidy house I have ever loved. Paper drifts across the floors. Paint covers the windows. The garden does exactly as it pleases. I am a woman who straightens the room before I let myself sit down, so I admired her enormously and also wanted to find her a broom. She talks about growing up the youngest of seven during the war, about her long marriage to the painter Roy Oxlade, and about why she would always rather paint than dust.

At the Kitchen Table with Ina

Ina Garten, Sofia Coppola, a bottle of Sofia’s champagne, and Ina’s kitchen table. I did not need to know anything else. They talk about Marie Antoinette, which somehow came out twenty years ago, and you know how I feel about Versailles. Sofia talks about the film she finished for her mother, interning for Karl Lagerfeld at Chanel when she was still a teenager, and where she likes to eat and shop in Paris and New York.

There is also the film of hers that her daughters adore above all the others, and which she is a little embarrassed by. I will not spoil it. And she has mastered Ina’s roast chicken. If Sofia Coppola is standing in her kitchen following an Ina recipe, the rest of us are in very good company.

Home Tour

This is the kind of house I could wander through for an entire afternoon and still leave something unseen. Lucy Abel Smith, a historian and author, has lived in this former rectory in the Cotswolds with her husband, David, for more than forty years. His family bought it from the Church of England in 1928.

Lucy grew up among collectors, and the rooms are layered with contemporary ceramics and glass, paintings, and things carried home from her work in Central Europe and the Balkans. What I loved most is that the old family furniture has been reupholstered and kept rather than replaced. Nothing sits behind a velvet rope. It all looks used and loved. It is the difference between collecting and accumulating that I talk about so often, and this house is collecting at its very best. And if that were not enough, there is a sculpture park beyond the garden.

Diary of a Designer

I have a weakness for a renovation series, and this one is just beginning, which means we get to follow it from the very first walk-through. Jojo and her team at House Nine are taking on Ham House, a family home of nearly 10,000 square feet on the Petersham Estate in Richmond that has hardly been touched since the 1990s. In this first episode she sits down with the owners, Nicola and Dan, to hear what they want.

What they want is not a showpiece. They want the house warm and soft and full of color, a place for real family life, with a few magical little spaces their children can grow into. I will be watching every episode, and I will report back.

One More Thing

I saved this one for last. The Weight of Regret featuring Leigh Meinert, about the things in our lives that simply do not resolve. The friendship that never mended. The question that never got its answer. Most of us grew up expecting that everything eventually works itself out, and when it does not, we decide we have failed.

This film gently disagrees. Some things will stay unfinished, it says, and we can still live well alongside them. I watched it with my cup going cold beside me and then sat for a while afterward.

That is everything from me this week. I hope your Saturday is exactly what you need it to be. Be careful if you are in the parth of the Nor’Easter. See you Monday.

Be sure to visit Kim at Northern California Style and Juliet at Make Mine a Spritzer for everything they are sharing this weekend.

Before you go, tell me: Rose Wylie lets the paper pile up because the painting matters more. Is there a corner of your house that has given up on being tidy because something better is happening there?

You can find me on Pinterest and Instagram for more of what I am loving this week.

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