THE STORY
The Farm began as a home in 2011, long before it was imagined as a place for guests. There was no masterplan. Provence Lodge came first. Western Farmhouse followed, then Tuscan Barn, the Flemish Garden and Walled Potager. Each new part answered something learnt by living here and made the next idea possible.
The reason for it has remained simple: to make a place where people genuinely want to spend time together. A table with room for everyone. A house where a conversation can carry on from the kitchen to the garden, and where disappearing with a book does not mean leaving the day behind.
The houses occupy different levels of the hill, yet live as one: the Barn gathering everyone back together, the Lodge carrying the day from garden to Potager, the Farmhouse holding the easy-going hours in between. One house, spread across an estate.
The interiors have grown in the same way: collected, not decorated. Something inherited beside something found; an antique beside a piece made specifically for the room. Timber, stone, zinc and terracotta are allowed to age. A little patina is not a problem. It is evidence that the house is being lived in.
Personal details find their way into the rooms. A favourite shirt becomes a carpet in a Barn bedroom. Oversized leaves carry the woodland underfoot in Western Farmhouse. Painted vegetables bring Walled Potager into Provence Lodge. In the Barn, animals cross the terracotta floor and climb the great fireplace. The stories are there to be discovered, never announced at the door.
Hospitality follows the same thinking: generous, personal and without performance. Prepare carefully, anticipate quietly and give people room to make the place their own. The hope is that the Farm soon feels less like somewhere being visited and more like a house the group knows how to inhabit. Some places are visited once. Others find their way into the family calendar.
The Farm is still growing. Nordic Stables are the next chapter, with space for the practical and creative life of the estate. Whatever comes next should serve the same purpose as what is already here: a place made for being together.
Francis Coussens
A personal project,
made to be shared.
Francis bought the property in 2011 and lived here before The Shepherds Farm was imagined as a place for guests. He learnt it by living here: where the morning light reaches, which terrace holds the evening sun, how the hill changes in mist and harvest, and what a country house needs when people come together. The place came before the concept.
The Farm grew from his interest in houses, gardens, food, clothes and objects — and from the simple pleasure of having people over.
Ralph Lauren has long been one of Francis’s reference points — not as a look to reproduce, but for the way a room, a table or a well-worn thing can suggest an entire way of living.
For Francis, recharging has never meant spending a weekend doing nothing. Energy can return through a walk, a meal cooked together, a long conversation or seeing something that makes you want to begin. The Farm was made to leave room for precisely that.
His approach to hospitality is equally personal. Notice when another log is needed, when coffee would be welcome, and when everyone is happiest left entirely alone. The aim is not to perform being a host, but to help the place feel, surprisingly quickly, like the group’s own.
The land came first
Woodland rises behind the houses; ahead, the land falls away through the Westhoek and into French Flanders. On clear days, the view seems to travel long before it stops.
The hill is not scenery added to the estate. It determines the light, weather and rhythm: mist below the pool, late sun at the fire pit, shelter within the Potager, paths leaving directly from the gate. The buildings step with the slope because the land asked them to.
That closeness changes the scale of a stay. Walk into the woods before breakfast. Follow the small roads through vineyards and villages. Come back with muddy boots and the sense that the outside belongs to the house too.
The Farm sits high on the southern slope of Flanders’ highest hill.
The hill is part of the house.
COLLABORATIONS
Some conversations become part of the house. The Farm has grown through people who make, question and see things differently.
