SOPHIE HICKS ARCHITECTS

Want to test your relationship with your mother? Design and build a house with her. “It was the most polite and understanding we’ve been to each other – ever,” confides Edie Campbell, slouched in a stripy deckchair on the balcony of the Northamptonshire homestead she recently constructed with her mum, Sophie Hicks. “In the past, we’ve had a slightly fractious relationship. You’re always ruder to your mother than you are to your friends. But suddenly we were in this professional situation and we were quite agreeable to each other.”

It helps that the 30-year-old model – an art history graduate who has fronted campaigns for Fendi and Versace, and is a regular presence in the pages of Vogue – has a sophisticated understanding of contemporary architecture. And that 60-year-old Hicks is a former British Vogue fashion editor turned prize-winning architect whose precise style has lent an elegant practicality to stores for Chloé and Paul Smith, and to homes for the Le Bon family. Still, both mother and daughter seem quietly thrilled with how the “house between two lakes” has turned out – and with how their relationship has been fortified by a 14- to 15-month build spread over national lockdowns. “Mum is full of opinions,” Edie laughs, affectionately. “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.”

After nearly three decades in London, as well as a whirlwind 15-year fashion career measured out in red-eye flights, Edie had been looking for a rural retreat for some time. She chose Northamptonshire, an understated, underrated county in the East Midlands, because she knew it well (Sophie has rented a cottage in the area since 1985, and the family has been coming here every summer) and because it was well-located for national horse trials (Edie is an amateur rider who has been competing semi-professionally since she was a teenager, with her horses in livery nearby). Campbell had seen a dozen places before she came across a fishery surrounded by farmland. The site of a former brick quarry, the previous owner had erected a handful of miscellaneous buildings, dug two lakes and stocked them with pike, and was running a coarse fishing business. Edie was immediately taken with the plot. “It had a nice energy, it was very quiet,” she says. And it had space for stables and paddocks for her horses. By May 2018, it was hers.

The buildings – a tired-looking bungalow and a falling-down shed among them – had to go. But Edie was adamant she didn’t want anything “slick and shiny and graphic” in their place. “Hedge-fund manager in the countryside” and “Bond villain’s lair” were red flags. Rather, she wanted the house to feel “in some way, of its world”. She simultaneously pets Pam the schnocker (a lively mix of miniature schnauzer and cocker spaniel) and gestures to the grey corrugated fibreboard that clads the long, thin house, giving it the appearance of a local barn. “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.”