The dream Yorkshire Moors home Orlebar Brown built

At first light, Tom Konig can be found padding barefoot outside the front door of Pennyholme, doing his morning chores. “I’ve got feet like hooves!” he laughs. The house he shares with his husband, Adam Brown, sits deep in the Sleightholmedale valley, alongside the river Hodge Beck. It was built from local sandstone in 1890 as a tenant farmhouse on a large estate, and has been added to in the intervening years. The banks are lined with giant gunnera and rhododendrons, and the surrounding valley sits in the thousands of acres of protected heathland that make up the North York Moors national park.

On this particular morning, Konig and the couple’s rescue dog, Sunny, have set off to the greenhouse to water the cucumbers, tomatoes and chillies that are growing there. En route he greets the five chocolate-brown Zwartbles sheep. By next year, they hope to have at least 15. “I’m planning on buying a loom,” he says. “When they’re shorn, I’ll wash the fleeces clean in the river and spin the wool.”

This might come as a somewhat surprising pivot for those who knew Konig in his former incarnation as the co-founder of The Communications Store, a prominent London PR company (he sold his share in 2015). Brown, meanwhile, founded the luxury swimwear label Orlebar Brown in 2007, acquired by Chanel in 2018; he remains close to the brand thanks to a founder-creative director role. Both men are popular fixtures of the London fashion scene. But since 2021, when they bought the property in Yorkshire, their lives have followed a slower, more bucolic rhythm.

Although the house they bought was good, the interiors were old-fashioned. There were, says Konig, “a million small rooms we didn’t need… Staff rooms, dining rooms, gun rooms, studies, built between the wars and added to in the ’50s”. They undertook the renovation with assistance from their friend the interior designer Jonathan Reed, a Yorkshireman who is known for his love of traditional craftsmanship. Reed had discovered Pennyholme while out walking with local friends. Soon he was helping to transform its warren of small rooms into wide, light-filled spaces with earthy tones that echo the surrounding landscape. The couple moved into the property in 2023.

“We’d been looking for a house in the country and came straight up from Cornwall where we were selling our old house,” recalls Brown, a tall, elegant-limbed man with a laconic sense of humour and a love of nature. He is standing on the Yorkstone terrace looking out to the dense banks of pine, silver birch and ancient oak trees that encircle the valley floor. “It was March, the rain was lashing down and there was not a leaf to be seen. We began the drive that winds for several miles through magical woodland, past a jumble of low stone walls and bridges that led us to the middle of this extraordinary valley. We both just fell immediately in love. We knew we were home before we even entered the house.”

Though unplanned, the move made sense. Brown’s love of nature is rooted in his childhood holidays in Cornwall with his grandmother, camping in caravans, eating tinned baked beans and surfing. Konig grew up in rural Northern Ireland, in the mountains of Mourne, where his parents ran one of the 150 Camphill communities founded by his Austro-Hungarian Jewish grandfather Karl König, who fled the Nazis in 1938. The communities, based on the teachings of Rudolf Steiner, were designed to give opportunities to those with special needs. They value biodynamic farming and craft and eschew television – a philosophy that goes a long way to explaining why Konig might want to weave a rug off his own sheep. Now that they are settled, he is passionate about his vegetable patch and the planting of the gardens, while Brown’s focus is on regenerating the surrounding woods. “We fell into defined roles here very quickly. Adam is very ‘big picture’, and I love to potter about!”

Pennyholme’s history is as rich as its setting. After the first world war, the Earl of Feversham, owner of Nawton Tower, the main house on the estate, and a passionate gardener, created an elaborate water garden in the valley, planting rhododendrons, azaleas and Japanese tree gardens. The farmhouse was then expanded into a summer retreat designed by Andrew Butler, a Victorian architect who was a pupil of Sir Edwin Lutyens and inspired by the arts and crafts movement that championed natural materials and harmony between home and landscape. A waterfall still cascades down stone steps from a tributary of the river flowing beneath the house.

Inside, everything is designed for practical, easy living. The ground floor works as three large spaces: a terracotta-tiled country kitchen with an Aga, an open-plan dining space and a sitting room. “We wanted rooms where everyone could be doing anything simultaneously: work or eat at the table, flop on the sofa with a book and be together whilst doing our own thing,” Konig says. Each room opens onto a terrace planted with roses, wisteria and hollyhocks, offering views across the valley. The drawing room overlooks the river and captures the evening light. It tends to be used much more for evening entertaining or TV-watching and is painted a warm chocolate brown, with deep sofas covered in rich velvets and linens.

Upstairs, the bedrooms are painted in organic paint colours – praline, green smoke, tobacco and putty pink – all reflecting the artisanal intentions of the house. The beds are custom-made, and the furniture is mostly a mixture of arts and crafts pieces offset by metal bedside tables to avoid anything becoming too thematic. A love of craft is evident in the pieces of Mouseman furniture the couple collect. “It’s such a lovely story!” says Konig. “In 1919, Robert Thompson, a Yorkshire furniture-maker, was working on a commission in Kilburn village, and one of his fellow craftsmen remarked that they were ‘as poor as church mice’, inspiring him to carve them onto his work as his trademark. It made him hugely famous! We have his mouse pieces throughout the house.”

A few of Konig and Brown’s urban habits are still visible: a stable block has been converted into an office, with a gym filled with state-of-the-art equipment. “We had to keep a bit of our city selves,” they laugh.

The pair have found a new community very quickly. They are friendly with the descendants of the Earl of Feversham, as well as the previous owners of the house who still live nearby. They also receive a steady stream of friends from London; the house is close to Andy Goldsworthy’s Hanging Stones art project at Rosedale in a neighbouring valley, should anyone feel like a five-hour walk. Konig has also found deeper and more meaningful roots than he expected in the village of Botton, in Danby Dale, where a Camphill community is housed in 600 acres of land. “It had gone out of my mind that it even existed,” he says. “But then I remembered coming to visit when I was a small child. My grandmother Tilla came here in 1955 and established it. Before then, people with special needs would have been institutionalised. Camphill provided them with a place to live, learn and work.” He opens a photo album made by his mother in which, among the pressed leaves and heathers collected from the moors more than 50 years ago, is a picture of him playing with Tilla in a garden created by the community members – just half an hour’s drive from his new home.

“I believe that my life has worked in 20-year cycles,” says Brown. “I’ve just turned 60, we threw a glorious party here and had a big lunch down by the river. Our friends old and new came to celebrate. I think the first 20 years of my life were spent in childhood, the next were slightly lost and aimless, and then from the ages of 40 to 60 I was working like a madman building Orlebar Brown. Now neither of us has to work so intensely, this house has provided us with the roots of how we see the next 20 years.”

The pair head off along a path mown through a meadow for the second of their daily swims in a wild pool they have created by the river. The early evening sun is casting its golden light across the valley. “When we arrived, the woodland was dense with pine. We’ve opened up the landscape while planting native trees and returning views to their historic state,” Brown says, taking in the scene. “I know we won’t see the full results in our lifetime, but this all feels so worthwhile. We could not be happier.”

Fiona Golfar. Photography by Julian Broad