A Look Inside The Late Angela Lansbury’s Irish Farmhouse

Angela Lansbury was a true star, on and off the screen. The legendary protagonist of Murder, She Wrote died on October 11 at the age of 96. Today we take a look back with the team from Architectural Digest with a glimpse back inside her Irish Farmhouse.

Born in London in 1925, Angela arrived in the United States as a teenager during WWII, and spent the early years of her career in California. She married talent agent Peter Shaw in 1949, and they had two children, Anthony and Deirdre (Peter also had a son, David, from a previous marriage).

When both of her children struggled with drugs in the late 1960s (her daughter, Lansbury revealed in a 2014 interview, “was in with a crowd led by Charles Manson”), she decided to move the family from Malibu to County Cork, Ireland. They spent the 1970s there; later, while filming Murder, She Wrote in Los Angeles, Lansbury felt the pull of Ireland again. She and Shaw purchased a piece of land in the Irish countryside in 1992 and constructed a charming farmhouse, which AD visited for the June 2007 issue, which celebrated country homes around the world.

Below, revisit the AD tour of Lansbury’s beloved refuge.

Her mother was born there. Her husband, Peter, and she raised their children there. But living and working in America, while filming Murder, She Wrote, Angela Lansbury had a longing for the quieter, gentler countryside she fondly remembered: “I decided to have a piece of Ireland again. I missed it terribly, and Peter went along with it.”

Every summer for five years, she and her husband took a room in a hotel in Cork, on the southeast coast, and searched for a modest retreat where their family and friends could convene around the dinner table that she loves to set with generously simple meals. “I am a good plain cook, an enthusiastic cook,” she says. “I enjoy food tremendously. It’s comforting and a wonderful way to bring people together.”

But nothing quite suited them. One day, while they were staying with friends in their country house, she took a long walk that led to a field of wildflowers and grass, and a meadow beyond, on a cliff overlooking the sea. The ocean, the meadow and the windy quietude all enchanted her. “What a lovely place to build our house, I thought. There something wonderful about looking out at sea and the nothingness. It was tranquil and calming,” she says.

It became a house that friendship built…

Stephen Pearce, the son of an old and dear friend, lived 15 minutes away in a house he had constructed. A potter, he understood what Lansbury was looking for because he had created a version of the vision himself, a house inspired by the traditional masonry farmhouses with slate roofs.

His godfather, an architect, had taught him about the proportions of indigenous houses, the relationship of a window to a wall and how to permit a maximum amount of light without introducing too much glass. “It was Stephen’s own house that inspired me,” she recalls. “He made it himself, by hand. What he achieved with available materials, and just simple, good spaces, impressed me.”

It is said that Ireland has produced more than its fair share of poets and writers because its poverty left the Irish a single luxury, the spoken word. It is an oral culture formed in what the Irish call craic—the banter at the dinner table, at the pub, on walks. The design of the house also took shape by craic. “There was a huge amount of work, a lot of talking and drawing,” says Pearce.

The close friends reached agreement about the design over a period of time, looking at things together, reversing decisions with a phone call and walking the land to hear what the views, the winds and the exposures said. “Each window was a decision that meant framing a different view and a different picture to be seen outside,” he remembers. “We were days with pegs. Most people would have said south, but if it was a little east, you’ d pick up early-morning rays that would reach across to the dining room table. In the evening, if you placed it right, another window would let light shoot across the floor to the fireplace.”

Design continued when Lansbury and her husband, who has since died, were in New York. “The fax machine would start cranking the minute something started not going right,” says Pearce. “It was really a house built by fax.”

As with his own house, the design that gradually came together was greatly influenced by the long tradition of local farmhouses. Local authorities, protective about the 17 acres of pure Irish lushness, feared a bungalow-style house with a low-pitched roof and a glassy coldness that would chill the landscape. Pearce allayed suspicions by inviting the inspector on walks to point out the long-established building type from which he was drawing inspiration. “I just kept talking, and they realized it would look like a group of farm buildings that could have been there for a hundred years,” he says.

Permission secured, Pearce worked with the craftsmen whom he had hired on his own house, “the men I’ d worked with my entire life.” He sought a few good materials: “He went through tremendous trouble to pick out the right floor tiles and slate and limestone,” notes the actress.

Viewed from the grass field to the sea beyond, the house now rises from the meadow with calm and poise. The white, one-story structure with the slate roof is timeless in its rudimentary simplicity yet almost modern in its abstraction. Walls bow slightly, as though they had settled over time. “It sits there like a loaf of bread,” says Lansbury.

The simplicity is deceptive.

The roof actually masks a pair of two-story wings on the far side, which embrace a small court paved in slate. The couple wanted the house to accommodate friends and family, and each wing houses second-floor guest rooms. The protected courtyard shelters pots of herbs Lansbury plants for cooking.

By a sleight of hand, the house that seems so small and intimate outside expands inside. “We never intended it to be so big, but Stephen would tell us what we needed was a few more feet, that the hall should be a little wide,” she says. The big hall gives onto a surprisingly large, loftlike living space, with an open corner kitchen that serves the surrounding dining and living areas. “It’s a house where you can paint, listen to music and just indulge yourself in the most unstructured way,” says Lansbury. The actress, who opened in the Broadway play Deuce in May, has matched the clean, well-lighted space with plain country furniture made in Ireland. “We didn’t want to bring stuff over from London,” she says. “We wanted to use Irish materials—Irish wood crafted by Irish woodworkers, and Irish linen. The draperies are horse blankets.” The ceramics were potted by Pearce.

She confirms the architectural simplicity by leaving the white walls bare. “My husband never let me hang pictures because, he said, the windows are the pictures,” she recalls. “The weather here changes the light so dramatically on the walls that you feel you’re on a set. It’s an artist’s dream house, full of lightness and brightness. It’s roomy, but it still feels cozy. It envelops me.”

At first, the construction attracted considerable attention, because word got out it was being built for the famous Jessica Fletcher of Murder, She Wrote. “Every Sunday there were queues of cars to see the house she was building,” says Pearce. “They’d presume somebody of her standing would want a lot of fountains. Nobody believed it when all they got was this cottage.”

In the end, it was a house like many others in Ireland—plain and beautiful in its economy—and the cars stopped coming. The house melted into the landscape, into tradition and into charming modesty. “I’m not a grand person,” Lansbury says. “I didn’t want a grand house.”

Via