Amanda Brooks is known as a writer, contributing editor at Condé Nast Traveler and AD and ex fashion director at Barneys New York.  What you may not know is that she is a great Lifestyle Architect too.  If such title exists, she’s earned it.  Amanda Brooks is a New Yorker who moved with her family to the English Countryside and had created an idyllic countryside life style.  All with absolute no previous experience.  It all started when Amanda decided to take a year break from the hustle and bustle of her busy career in the City and moved with her family to the farm where her husband grew up in Oxfordshire, England.  Yes, she traded attending front row fashion shows, dressing head to toe in designer clothes and attending the fancy after parties for the calm and charm of the English countryside, complete with horses, sheep, pigs and pretty gardens.  The one year became years and now is the family’s permanent residence, as she told AD where their Farm was featured.  Amanda also told AD that she is currently writing a book about the whole experience.   Her Instagram account is like a dream no one would like to wake up from, at least not me, full of beautiful and inspiring images from nature, gardens, dogs and her children.  You can also appreciate snippets of her home, Fair Green Farm, and how unpretentious and beautiful she decorates it.  Everything looks so livable and tangible… yet so tasteful.

I love to hear stories like this because it’s all but a reminder that the real pleasures in life are about substance and whatever fills your heart.  It’s about what makes you wake up in the morning with a full heart.  Of course all better when done in style, as Amanda shows us.