There are a few things in life, I always think, that are the markers of an excellent person. One, a dedication to a cup of tea. Two, a love of dogs that might, to the uninitiated, seem obsessive, but, to those in the know, can never be too much. Three, a connection to place and nature, which becomes the basis for all of your best ideas and your utmost peace. Mariella Frostrup ticks all three boxes.
And so, at 5.10pm on an early summer Friday (specifically ten past five, so that she has time to properly brew a cup of tea after getting the train home to Somerset from London), Mariella and I kick off with an emphatic conversation about dogs. Or one dog in particular: her eight-month-old Boxer/Golden Retriever/Poodle-Mix Moby.
“I’ve always been quite an unsentimental dog owner, but I’m so in love with Moby it’s pathetic,” she says, laughing. “What I love about having a dog is that you have to go for a walk. Without one, it can feel like such a massive indulgence, particularly for women, because we always think we’ve got to be busy with something. But as soon as you’ve got a dog looking at you expectantly, it forces you out. It gives me a chance to quiet my mind and to work things out.”
These walks happen daily through the rolling Somerset countryside around Bruton, her home for the past 13 years with husband Jason McCue and their children, Molly, 20, and Dan, 19. For a market town of around 3,000 people, Bruton has a particular cultural heartbeat. Michelin-starred restaurants, celebrated bakeries, galleries, breweries and cheesemakers all sit among its old stone streets and surrounding farmland. “Bruton is a one-horse town,” says Mariella. “If you picked it on the map, there would be no reason for all of this to happen. But it has and Hauser & Wirth should get a lot of praise for being the catalyst.”
A creative life
The contemporary gallery she’s referring to has outposts in New York, London, Zurich and Los Angeles, and has become something of an epicentre for the town’s creative life. But what Mariella loves most is its lack of pretension. “It is a world-class gallery, but with a real local feel. On the flipside of that, we have the village hall, where one week you’ll get an old colonel talking about being the first person in the British army to have units in Palestine, the next week there’s someone talking about growing tulips.
“There are a lot of people who don’t want to feel that they’ve been relegated to a rural life that puts them outside of what’s happening in the world. They still want to be engaged. Bruton encourages that.”
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Perhaps it’s no surprise that Bruton – and Hauser & Wirth in particular – has become the setting for Mariella’s latest venture. This month, she launches her first festival, Big Brue. The idea came to her and Jason shortly after moving to Somerset, and is a project that has come to life with travel writer and podcaster Catherine Fairweather and event organiser Eleanor O’Keeffe. Rather than creating another literary festival, Mariella wanted a programme designed to challenge assumptions, encourage discussion and celebrate community. Its purpose, she explains, has been born out of the societal shifts of recent years.
“We’re all living in little bubbles where we only hear opinions we share, and we get mortally offended when someone says something we disagree with,” she explains. “We seem to be losing our capacity for hearing other points of view, which feels imperative in a democracy and a civilised society.”
The first guests they booked were Prue Leith and her son, the Reform MP Danny Kruger, who hold vastly different political and moral standpoints. “They’re going to talk about how you navigate toxic political disagreements within the context of having Sunday lunch twice a month, which they do,” she explains. Other conversations include environmentalist Ben Goldsmith debating rewilding with a local dairy farmer, alongside guests such as Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, Dominic West and Dame Harriet Walter.
Mariella believes Bruton’s atmosphere could be key to making those conversations work. “I get off the train and I take a big breath in and out,” she says, with no signs of today’s post-rush-hour trip in evidence: hair a perfectly shaped bob, signature thick-rimmed specs and chic but practical knit. “It’s difficult to get irate when you’re looking at bucolic Somerset fields. Hopefully, that will create a convivial environment for what we’re trying to do.”
The peace and connection found in the countryside is not a new thing for Mariella. Born in Norway, she moved to rural Ireland with her family aged six, staying there until she left for London at 16. It was in Connemara that she learned to swim in open water (“I refuse to call it wild swimming. To us, it was just swimming”), and where the need for nature became woven into the fabric of her life.
“If you’ve grown up in the country, it’s deeply rooted in you,” she says. “Just the instinct, when the going gets tough, to get to the countryside. It feels like something that’s embedded, that you can’t really change. You love it in all weathers.”
Coming home
Summertime in Bruton, though, has a particular allure. Exuberant dahlias dancing in the garden, long evenings around the barbecue with friends, Somerset sunsets stretching over the rolling hills and riverbanks. The house itself was created by joining three gardeners’ cottages, which Mariella and Jason painstakingly restored, then filled with an eclectic mix of their tastes and travels. Behind her sit feathered lampshades from local makers alongside Islamic enamelled plates and decorative heads from West Africa. Everything, she says, tells a story.
The gardens are sprawling and gloriously untamed in places, tended to by Jason and gardener Kirsty. Mariella’s only stipulations? “No purple or anything too formal,” she laughs. “Jason’s never happier than when he’s in a garden centre, whereas I love the wildness: all the gunneras [giant rhubarb] that look like Alice in Wonderland plants, big enough to sit on.”
Her favourite spot is the cabin at the bottom of the garden, now home to both her and Jason’s offices, overlooking fields and a waterfall-fed stretch of river that’s made for swimming. “Sometimes I think I could happily live in that cabin, with nothing but the field in front of me, no upkeep, no fuss. It’s the perfect bit of land.”
With festival preparations ramping up, a #ModernRelationships podcast to record and her new role as the government’s Women’s Employment Ambassador, Mariella admits this might be the busiest time of her life. “It’s important to live what you preach,” she says. “I’m constantly telling women who feel sidelined once they reach middle age that it’s a brilliant time to reinvent yourself and try new things. To see it as a kind of gift, a second phase.”
And perhaps that is where Bruton comes in once again. The river, the rolling fields, the dog walks and the dahlias. The quietness that allows the mind to keep whirring while the soul remains calm. A balance between thought and stillness. What bliss.
Big Brue takes place on 19-20 September. For tickets and more information, visit Big Brue.
