14 May 29, 2022The Sunday Times
Home
Charlie Luxton, the presenter
of Building the Dream on
More4, to create a simple
aesthetic: white walls, concrete
and wood. The entire 6,000 sq
ft building is run on solar
power and warmed by a
ground-source heat pump.
Taking a concrete slab out
of the modernist starchitect
Richard Rogers’s book,
Richter and Mahr have created
a central piazza where people
can meet to talk and eat under
giant roof lights. ‘The most
important thing for me was
that the workspaces are
centred on the kitchen/café,”
Mahr says.
The plan is to hire an in-
house chef, but for now staff
take it in turns to cook “big
Italian-style lunches”, using
produce from the gardens.
“It’s a work in progress,”
Richter says. “The idea is that
people will be able to meet
over lunch and talk and
exchange ideas. So you might
find a Hollywood director
sitting next to an unknown
young artist, with food at the
heart of everything.”
The recording studio and
Richter’s writing room are
soundproofed buildings
within the main building. Two
designers worked on different
structures simultaneously.
“The grand opera around
getting the enormous concrete
floor poured at the right time
and in the right way to suit two
separate sets of architects andMax was internationally
famous we were not making
ends meet.” So how did they
manage? “We’ve always been
renters,” Richter says.
“Getting to this point has been
a 30-year journey.”
It’s partly why the couple
wanted to build a communal
space within their own home.
“When you’re starting out and
you can’t afford studio rates of
£100-plus an hour, it gets in
the way of your work,” Richter
says. “We’ve been able to
create this wonderful place
and we wanted to share it. It’s
a bridge for those people who
are talented and dedicated but
not well connected.”
Already living locally, they
searched for five years for the
right site. “All the buildings
around here had very low
ceilings, so we couldn’t adapt
them,” Mahr says. “None of
the barns we saw were quite
right. Then, incredibly
fortuitously, this site, a former
alpaca farm set in 31 acres of
woodland, came up.”
They hired a local architect,FOR RICHTER, FOR
Now he has made it big, the composer Max and
his wife, Yulia, have created a home with space
to help musicians who haven’t. By Caroline Scott
ANDREW FOX FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES; LORENZO ZANDRIThe place is a
bridge for people
who are talented
and dedicated but
not well connected
D
eep in the
Oxfordshire
countryside,
minutes from
Soho Farmhouse,the composer Max Richter and
his wife, the visual artist Yulia
Mahr, have designed an “art
farm”. It is a masterclass in
pared-back restraint, in many
ways the opposite of the flashy
private members’ club.
In addition to offering
commercial studio space for
established talent in the
bucolic Cotswolds, it provides
free residencies and support
for struggling musicians.
Richter is in the former
category; if you haven’t heard
of him, you have almost
certainly heard his music. As
well as composing for operas
and ballets, he has written
scores for more than 30 films
and TV shows. Part of his The
Four Seasons Recomposed
album can be found in Netflix’s
period romp Bridgerton and he
wrote the music for the HBO
adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s
My Brilliant Friend and the
Apple TV+ series Invasion.
For 20 years the couple
dreamt about a place where
they could help to nurture
talent, but it took a lockdown
for them to have the time to
pursue it.
Richter, 56, wasn’t able to
make a living from music
until he was in his forties.
“It was unbelievably tough,”
Mahr says. “Even when