When it comes to rural retreats, British tradition tends to demand a trophy proudly set on a faultless greensward, a neoclassical paragon with a complement of heroic columns. But the getaway that Peter Mikic, an interior designer with an alluringly maximalist brand of glamour, and his husband, media consultant Sebastian Scott, recently constructed rejects the look-at-me school. Located on 170 acres in Oxfordshire, some 50 miles distant from their London digs, the building is discreet, even featureless at first glance. A low-slung masonry building emerging from a wind-ruffled meadow full of flowers and backed by thick woodland, it might, just possibly, be a chicly renovated barn or stable. Or even, perhaps, a onetime industrial building, an impression furthered by the graffiti mural near the front door. Of course, it’s not just any idle tagging. Painted by a friend’s daughter, the plein air work was a gift to the couple when they married last June.
“Everyone is shocked by the house, really,” says Mikic, a native Australian whose rangy stature, luxuriant whiskers, and piercing blue eyes give him the appearance of a Victorian soldier of fortune. “It is so unassuming, which is what I love about it.” Open the front door, though, and suddenly, startlingly, a different experience greets the eye. Expansive glass walls reveal that the building wraps a spacious walled courtyard that is as manicured and tranquil as the larger landscape—award-winning designer Tom Stuart-Smith was responsible for the high-contrast grounds—which is carefree and lively with wildlife, from deer to endangered red kites. “The public rooms, as well as our bedroom, face the woods, but the kitchen and guest rooms open to the courtyard, which is really the focal point of the house,” Mikic explains of the latter space, which is dotted with domes of clipped yew. A swimming pool occupies an adjacent walled area.
For many years, Mikic and Scott were perfectly content with the humble structure that had long occupied the site, a “falling down” gamekeeper’s cottage on 170 acres of land they had purchased from designer Ashley Hicks; the couple are godfathers to one of Hicks’s children. “Once upon a time, the queen stopped for a lunchtime drink,” Mikic says of the cottage. (The monarch’s late husband, Prince Philip, and Hicks’s mother were cousins, hence the royal drop-by.) Mikic and Scott refurbished it a bit, adding a yellow rubber floor and “sweet furniture we picked up at local markets,” planting vegetables, and raising chickens. Creativity abhors a vacuum however; grander plans were set into motion, ditto second thoughts. “Many moments, Sebastian and I sat in the cottage and asked why we were embarking on such a project,” Mikic recalls. Onward and upward, though, and following eight years of negotiations with the planning-permission powers that be, ground was broken and the present 11,000-square-foot house— it took five years to complete—began to rise.
The primary material is Herefordshire sandstone, laid without mortar and graduated from thick at ground level to thin at the top. With its subtle bronzed copper detailing, it is a house that blends into the landscape. Mikic’s preference was to let Mother Nature direct the conversation indoors too. “When you’re dealing with a traditional house, you can contain a brighter look and play around with whatever you like,” he observes, noting that the courtyard rooms have white ceilings, which reflect the sunlight, while the woodland rooms have ceilings sheathed in straight-grain oak. “But here, with the enormous windows, the primary colors were already established by the views. Nothing could really compete.”
That did not mean falling back on well-mannered neutrals entirely, however. The dining room has fuzzy blue chairs set atop a Mikic-designed fitted carpeting of confectionary pink speckled with raspberry spots, and the kitchen sports a lemon yellow range that is positioned in the glow of a skylight. “It’s such a lovely, happy color,” Mikic says. “Cooking there is a dream.” So is dining: The kitchen’s glass exterior wall slides fully open so the couple and their guests can take meals on the adjoining terrace. The boldest palettes in the house can be found in spaces with no view or offering only a smidgen of sky. The larder has pink polished-plaster walls offset by yellow-and-white ceramic tiles that Mikic had made in Spain, and orange sheepskin furs the chairs in the underground home theater, for which he created a wildly patterned carpeting based on an Ettore Sottsass motif.
“Half the fun of this house was that we were never up against any deadline,” the designer says. “We lived and worked in London and just took our time searching for the right materials, makers, and manufacturers. The research was a lot of fun—this is not a serious grown-up house in a way, but it is unique.” Working with artisans allowed him to conjure up a carpet with a brain-coral pattern, bronze drawer pulls in the shape of pills for bedside tables and cabinets, bathroom cabinets paneled with raffia, and tangerine coat hooks for the mudroom, where Mikic also arranges flowers. “Sebastian grows the most amazing sweet peas.” It took a year and a half to finesse a squiggly emerald green ceiling fixture.
A trip to an off-the-radar quarry in the South of France found Mikic attempting to charm the business’s wary owner. “I had lunch with her and a translator,” he recounts. “At no point did we ever discuss how much it would cost. Then there was quite a funny moment, when she told me, ‘You must come back and select what you like.’” He did, and today three different shades of flamboyantly veined stone (“It looks like an organic terrazzo”) line the baths. The saturated colors, from gold to black on black (in the spa), are offset by potted plants. There are so many, in fact, that Mikic, embarrassed by the excess, hid many of them before the photographer came calling. “I’m obsessed with houseplants, and it drives Sebastian crazy,” Mikic says with a laugh. “I think I’m turning into my mother.”
This story appears in AD*’s October 2022 issue. To see Peter Mikic’s home in print,* subscribe to AD.
