(She has authored two books about her love of, and life in, fashion, I Love to fit in farm tasks between writing and raising a family.īrooks-willowy and beautiful and a fixture on Best Dressed lists-was brought up in Palm Beach and New York, studied at Brown, where she double-majored in art history and visual arts, then moved to New York, where she worked for Patrick Demarchelier, Larry Gagosian, and Frédéric Fekkai before becoming a designers’ muse, a columnist for Men’s Vogue,Īnd, briefly, the fashion director of Barneys. Knowing no one, I felt completely isolated and lost.” She certainly never imagined that this might be somewhere she’d eventually live, surrounded by children and animals, rising every day at 5:30 a.m. “But Christopher would disappear all day to work on a tractor. “Of course I was staggered by how it looked,” she recalls of that first season The couple met in New York, and spent a summer here when Amanda was 22. It was Brooks’s artist husband, Christopher, who introduced her to his native Oxfordshire. Her farm is less than two hours northwest of London, but to gaze upon it now, in the hazy light of afternoon, this land might as well be a century removed. “But now it feels like home-I’ve taken ownership.” In her sun-filled Cotswolds kitchen, Brooks is reflecting on the curious path that led her to this Jane Austen–worthy landscape, with its undulating hills, mellow green pastures, and market towns of golden-hued limestone. “When I used to visit this part of the world, I found it so beautiful I could hardly relate to it,”says Amanda Brooks.

I Love Your Style by Amanda Brooks