From the terrace of Woodchester House, glorious Gloucestershire countryside,
dotted with cooing wood pigeons and screaming peacocks, stretches as far as
the eye can see. It is difficult to imagine a more English scene - until,
that is, a handful of wallabies come bounding into view and quiver nervously
before bending and nibbling at the back lawn.
The back garden in question, which extends to four acres, belongs to Richard
Hains, a secretive Australian multimillionaire. He has spent the past four
years imposing his own stamp on the beautiful Grade II*-listed property -
which has included introducing a mob of the gingery-brown marsupials into
the grounds.
The boxy Georgian house, built in yellow-grey stone, is where the London-based
hedge-funder passes his weekends. The rest of his time is spent in one of
those symmetrical white edifices in Holland Park, in west London, or in his
native Melbourne, where he has a flat.
Hains, 44, who once founded a gold mine in Mongolia and now runs “a private
sophisticated hedge fund”, first came across Woodchester House, three miles
from Stroud, in 2003, after the break-up of his marriage. He saw it
advertised in Country Life and immediately telephoned the estate agent to
bag the first viewing of the day.
“I got up at 6.30am and drove straight down to take a look,” he says. “The
garden was completely overgrown, the interior was a bit shabby and the pool
was falling to bits. It was also bigger and more expensive than what was I
looking for, but it was beautiful.” It cost him £2.25m - for which he got
not just the main house, but two cottages, several outbuildings and 30
acres. He has since lavished much of his spare time, and “hundreds and
thousands of pounds”, on transforming it both inside and out.
Tim Jeffries, director of the photography gallery Hamiltons and a professional
partygoer, is a regular visitor. So, too, are Hains’s near neighbours,
Robert Hanson, a millionaire banker, and Tracy Bennett, former boss of
London Records, who introduced him to the charms of the Cotswolds shortly
before he bought.
With his slicked-back curls, a light tan and a shirt that always seems to have
that extra button undone, Hains looks every bit the playboy. He also has the
obligatory boy’s toys: a gunmetal Aston Martin DB5, a powerful motorbike and
a yacht moored in Antibes.
Today, relaxing at home with Fred, his six-year-old golden labrador, and
Gabriela Banova, 28, a Czech model he has been dating for six months, he
looks positively domesticated. First things first, though. He skips off to
light the fire (draughty places, these Georgian houses, for models at least)
in the reception room, which has a carved fireplace that dwarves even his
6ft 2in frame.
Leaning against the maple work surface in the kitchen, which leads off the
reception room, as he waits for the kettle to boil, Hains wants to set the
record straight. He is not, as was claimed recently in the business pages of
this newspaper, an “Australian ego-maniac”. Nor, he insists, does he
resemble the Manhattan-based financial-whiz “hero” of his debut novel,
Chameleon, who by page seven has reluctantly interrupted a cocaine-fuelled
threesome to take a call from his broker to sell $500m of bonds. Published
in America last year, the book, although not a flop, has not been the
literary success he had anticipated; undeterred, he is looking for a UK
publisher.
Hains, who first moved to Britain more than 20 years ago, with subsequent
stints in New York and the Bahamas, is instead keen to show off his latest
project: his country house. The walls of the kitchen are adorned with glossy
photographs of his children by his ex-wife, Dani – Max, 15, Olivia, 13, and
Helena, 10 – all beaming white-toothed smiles from yachts in the Med or
muffled in garish ski wear on the slopes. It is a comfortable room, with
fitted duck-egg-blue cabinets and a shiny four-oven Aga, more suited to a
Boden-wearing yummy mummy than a man who has partied with Wafah Bin Ladin,
Osama’s pop-star niece.
In between endless cups of tea, Hains chats happily about paint colours, the
cost of Cotswold stone and varieties of the 100 eucalyptus trees he has
planted. These have extended the arboretum created in the grounds in the
1930s by Hiram Winterbottom, a previous owner who was associated with the
nearby Westonbirt Arboretum and, rather scandalously for the time, lived in
the house with his boyfriend.
The seven-bedroom property dates to 1746, a good two decades before Captain
Cook reached the southeastern coast of Australia – a fact that amuses Hains.
“The house has more history than the country I come from,” he says. “That’s
when I think how lucky I am when I add my bits to it. I have gone to great
lengths and expense to keep the integrity of the original architecture.”
One of Hains’s first steps in his quest to recreate the perfect Georgian
estate was to lay a croquet lawn. “The ground in front of the house was
ropey and overgrown, so we redid that, and now,” he says, spreading his arms
wide to display the front of the house as his two peacocks, Heckle and
Jekyll, peck at the manicured turf, “I think it accentuates the beauty of
the house. It’s also just fun wandering around with friends and a glass of
wine.”
A new dry-stone wall, linking the main house to its outbuildings and the 30 or
so acres beyond, is nearly complete. Replacing an “ugly wire fence”, it is
intended to keep out the foxes and keep in the wallabies, which he bought
from Longleat and West Midland Safari Park. Hains has also reinstated the
lake and stocked it full of trout, renovated the dovecote and tidied up the
woodshed.
The pièce de résistance is the pool - 39ft long, heated and
up to 7½ft deep, plenty deep enough for a diving board – where he swims most
mornings when he is staying. The addition he is most proud of, though, is
the pool house, which he designed himself. “My grandfather was an
architect,” he says. “It’s not difficult to be an architect: you just need a
ruler, paper and a pencil. I wanted a 1970s toilet block in Cotswold stone.”
And that is exactly what it looks like on the outside, although inside it has
21st-century facilities, including a steam room and a shower. The slimline
windows are at precisely the right height for Hains to shave and look out of
the window to survey the rolling green landscape beyond - and, if he’s
lucky, spot a wallaby among the trees.
The interior of the house, meanwhile, has been stripped of the frills and
country-house trimmings of the previous owners - “Laura Ashley and wallabies
didn’t really blend together,” Hains says. They have been replaced by huge
artworks: colourful canvases by Tim Maguire, a portrait of Mel Gibson in his
Mad Max days and aboriginal paintings, rather than ornately framed oils of
bewigged ancestors.
In the hall is an oversized sculpture of a vase of flowers in candy-floss-pink
glass by Mark Douglas, a contemporary alternative to a posy of fresh blooms.
The only concession to tradition is a chandelier Hains found at the flea
market at Clignancourt. “It was an excuse to go to Paris for the weekend,”
he says.
It seems you can take the man out of Australia, but you can’t take the Aussie
out of the man. “I am what I am,” he says. “An Australian living in England.
I’ll always be an outsider.” Despite all his years in Britain, Hains has
never lost his accent – in fact, he thinks the longer he is away from
Australia, the stronger it gets. As well as the Australian art, he has
shipped over some foals from his father’s famous Kingston Park Studs, which
he stables at Hanson’s house, 15 minutes away.
Hains still has plans for the house. His latest project is to knock through
the french windows in the kitchen and add a 20ft-high glass extension that
would launch out into the garden, flooding the room with light. Last month,
however, English Heritage, which rules on changes to a Grade II*-listed
building, rejected his proposal. Hains is appealing - and, judging by his
record, he is not likely to give up.
www.chameleonanovel.com
So he states the "house has more history than the country I come fromâ€. His smug ignorance would be charming if it wasn't so insulting to 40,000 years of indigenous culture and habitation in Australia. But ah yes...he still seems to like their 'history-less' paintings hanging on his walls.
Tamsin, London,
Of course wallabies in the gardens of big houses are nothing new. I do hope Mr Hains conforms to the old rules and refrains from telling visitors about the wallabies, leaving them to doubt the evidence of their own eyes.
FH, Norwich,