Country Life 9 April 2025

Country Life 9 April 2025 is our interiors special, also looking at island homes, great art, and the joy of Spam.

drawing room
A drawing room by Henriette Von Stockhausen of VSP Interiors, photographed by Paul Massey, as seen on the cover of Country Life 9 April 2025.
(Image credit: Paul Massey for VSP Interiors)

Here's a look at some of what you'll find inside:

The legacy

Amie Elizabeth White admires the blossoms that Collingwood ‘Cherry’ Ingram left behind

The very best of luck

Magpies, hay bales and dirty socks could mean the difference between winning and losing, discovers Harry Pearson

Spam, spam, spam

Mary Greene tucks into spam, the American pork product that filled our post-war cupboards

magazine page

(Image credit: Country Life / Future)

Interiors

Arabella Youens talks social media and sustainability with the new generation of designers; Amelia Thorpe champions the drawing room and offers her pick of springtime looks; Giles Kime salutes design hero Christopher Gibbs, there’s a stylish kitchen, new kitchen materials to intrigue; and Giles Kime wonders why the British design such desirable hotels

With a heavy art

Henry Clay Frick may have been a ruthless businessman, but the art collection he left the world still stirs the heart of Michael Prodger

magazine page

(Image credit: Country Life / Future)

As good as new

Owen Holmes explores the revitalised Frick in New York, US

Mary Miers’s favourite painting

The architectural writer picks an atmospheric aquatint redolent with the Highland Picturesque

Is farm profitabililty a reality?

In her last Farming Life column, Minette Batters laments the lack of consideration for agriculture

‘Of the islands’

A former storehouse-dwelling on a remote harbour in Harris has been given a new lease of life. Mary Miers visits Rodel

magazine page

(Image credit: Country Life / Future)

Fern, baby, fern

Adventurous Victorians clambered up and down cliffs to fill their homes with the green gold of our damp places. Jack Watkins unravels the fronds

What’s not to like?

Few can resist hardy, floriferous and fragrant Clematis montana, least of all Charles Quest-Ritson

Making mulch of it

All our garden plants would benefit from homemade mulch. Charles Quest-Ritson extols the virtues of this ancient practice

Foraging

John Wright peps up his pasta with a pinch of the elusive morel

magazine page

(Image credit: Country Life / Future)

The good stuff

Hetty Lintell falls for the charms of gleaming silver in all its guises

Arts & antiques

The codes hidden in flowers and gemstones, The Great Gatsby and the genius of the Carraccis

California here we come

Gold is being mined once more in the mountains of Wales. Harry Pearson channels his inner prospector and sets off to Gwynedd

And much more

Toby Keel

Toby Keel is Country Life's Digital Director, and has been running the website and social media channels since 2016. A former sports journalist, he writes about property, cars, lifestyle, travel, nature.