Everyone knows that person who spends weeks sniffing around travel blogs, going deep into Tripadvisor rabbit holes, collecting Google docs from friends of friends, and creating A Beautiful Mind–style spreadsheets to come up with the best vacations and itineraries possible. In this recurring series, we find those people who’ve done all the work for you and have them walk us through a particularly wonderful, especially well-thought-out vacation they took that you can actually steal.
Fanny Singer hadn’t been back to England — her onetime on-and-off home of ten years — since 2019. “I never thought I’d leave England,” says the Los Angeles–based writer, editor, and co-founder of the home design brand Permanent Collection. “I returned to the U.S. to secure a long-term visa, and then there was a pesky global pandemic.” With a few years to scheme with her friends about how to get back together, in 2022 they finally found an event (a good friend’s birthday) and a large enough house to gather beneath one roof at the same time.
They set their sites on Suffolk county for its proximity to London and its singular landscapes. “You can’t believe how many greens there are,” says Singer, who used to live between Cambridge and London while earning her master’s in art history and Ph.D. on British artist Richard Hamilton, shuttling back and forth from the two cities through Suffolk for research. Once the location was secured, the only planning left was the menu. “What’s so great about a big group in a house like this is there are grand sitting rooms where someone is reading a book or telling a story in front of the fire. You can have everyone together but still do your own thing. The only structure for each day is the meals.” Here, Singer shares a long weekend’s worth of meals, a grocery list worthy of food royalty, and the dos and don’ts for throwing an epic dance party in a house of equally epic proportions.
Rent the house
There are two especially wonderful sites on which to find great houses. One is the Landmark Trust and the other is the National Trust. British friends of mine use these sites. The properties are scattered all over. Some are in continental Europe. We were looking close to Easter and without tons of lead time. There were not so many places large enough to host 12 friends. We were lucky enough to find this in Cavendish Hall. You have to pay for the entire thing up front. It was 4,000 pounds for the weekend. I put it on my credit card — thank God for that broken American financial system. It worked out to be very affordable with all of us splitting it.
The house has real Jane Austen vibes in the sense of the palette and appointments, though there have been obvious updates to it since the Regency era. For example, they fixed the central heating. It was toasty warm in there, which I’m not used to in English houses. The kitchen was well equipped. The house had a surprisingly good assortment of pots and pans. The bedrooms were all pretty grand with hilarious old beds and amazing windows. The house also has an incredible history. The last owner was Pamela Matthews. She was British Intelligence in WWII and is the cousin of Francis Bacon, so he had visited and stayed. I highly recommend this house.
Fly to London
I was visiting London for a rather long time because my partner is a film editor, so I had been in England for a couple weeks. But if you’re flying directly in for the weekend, London Standsted Airport is an international airport that’s only 45 minutes from the house. It’s much closer than Heathrow. We had a lot of friends fly in from Berlin.
Buy groceries two to five days in advance
I ordered produce from Natoora. It works with tons of small farmers throughout France, Italy, and England. It has all of the beautiful northern Italian radicchio. It’s the best place to get shopping done when you can’t go to the small farmers’ markets. Order online or through Natoora’s app and have it delivered to you in London the morning you leave or directly to the house by DPD, a courier service in London.
For chicken, eggs, bacon, butter, and chicken stock, there’s a wonderful butcher next to Natoora in London, recommended to me by the woman who runs Natoora. It has quality meat and maybe the whitest eggs I’ve ever seen. We bought three or four small chickens for 12 people.
For porridge bread, I ordered from the Flor, which is the bakery associated with Lyle’s, a wonderful restaurant in Shoreditch. Its porridge bread is a very hydrated sourdough loaf with a wonderful, custardy texture. We got pasta and Pecorino and Parm from a little Italian deli near where I was staying in Notting Hill. It’s nothing too notable.
I bought many good bottles of Italian organic cold-pressed olive oil at Sally Clarke. It’s an old London institution and sells the Italian bottled restaurant oil we use. We went through three bottles a day that weekend.
The night before we left, I made a huge batch of granola — enough for 12 people to have for three days. I make it with buckwheat oats, dates, walnuts, and coconut, and I use olive oil, maple syrup, and orange zest at the end. It’s good! It was nice to have one simple thing for an easy breakfast and snack every day. I made such a huge batch that friends were taking baggies home at the end of the weekend.
Day 1
7 p.m.: Drive to the house
We rented a car from Enterprise in London. My partner, Matt, showed up in a Tesla, which was the only automatic car. I would suggest something bigger if you’re bringing the groceries with you — we were packed like sardines with all of the groceries. We drove this gleaming white chariot to this Jane Austen–era house, which was hilarious. But there is an electric car hookup at the house.
Matt is editing Noah Baumbach’s film and we couldn’t leave until 7:30 p.m. I would not recommend leaving when we left, which was a little after rush hour. I was calling ahead and saying, “Get the water on for the pasta!” If you can, leave at 3:30; that would be ideal. The house is not super-close, so it’s nice to see the English countryside and arrive in daylight to view it in all its glory. Then you have time to turn the lights on, get situated, and start a fire in the parlor before dinner. But pulling up to the house at night was great because it looked so grand illuminated.
9 p.m.: Start cooking dinner
We started cooking as soon as we arrived. We didn’t unpack the groceries until after dinner. By 9:30 people were ready to eat. Cacio e pepe is a crowd-pleaser, and it comes together in 20 minutes.
I’m obsessed with salad. I make salad all the time. We had these gorgeous deep-red and petal-pink radicchio leaves from the Veneto in northern Italy. And beautiful butter lettuces as well. One of the things I love to use to make salad dressing is a mortar and pestle. My standard vinaigrette is typical of my mom’s restaurant. I macerate garlic in vinegar, let it sit for 10 minutes, then whisk in olive oil and a teaspoon of Dijon mustard. The hack is to bring a microplane and grate the garlic, then give it a quick smash with a knife.
That night, people had brought chocolate bars and tangerines. We were eating dessert at midnight, squeezed around the wood table in the more informal breakfast room with a country-kitchen vibe, old fireplaces, and benches. There’s also a grand, daunting formal dining room that has oxblood marble, burgundy wallpaper, and ionic columns, but we saved that room for a dance party the next night.
Day 2
9 a.m.: Have a B&B breakfast
People woke up when they would. My friend Rosy went out and picked daffodils to put on the table. The breakfast felt like I was running a B&B. I set out the toaster on the sideboard. Stacks of bowls, tea, jugs of milk, yogurt, berries, and granola. Then we had a lazy midmorning exploration of the property. The house is on something like 30 acres of land.
Noon: Stock up on firewood
Quite close to town, there is a well-stocked farm shop. If you forget flour or pasta, fruit, vegetables, anything critical, you could easily get it there. Sometimes towns around these areas have truly bad grocery stores, but this one is quite good. It was nice to have almost everything we needed, but Willow Tree Farm Shop and Café (Lower Rd., Glemsford, Sudbury CO10 7QU) is less than a five-minute drive from the house. You could walk, but we drove because firewood would have been unpleasant to carry back. I also bought more berries, dishwasher tablets, and these nice roasted red peppers in olive oil. That was the big outing for Saturday.
1 p.m.: Start making lunch
It’s all about eating when you gather with me. For lunch, we made a deconstructed salad niçoise that is from my book, Always Home. It takes around 45 minutes to an hour to prep. I used the roasted peppers I picked up at the farm shop. At Natoora I bought these wonderful winter tomatoes from Sicily. They’re smaller, quite ruched tomatoes that are very firm in texture with tinges of green to them. You wouldn’t think they could be good, but they’re delicious. Then I had cans of nice tuna in olive oil that I had picked up with the pasta in the Notting Hill deli, which is kind of essential for a salad niçoise. Then olives and soft-boiled eggs. If you want the yolks to be set but not hard, it’s six minutes in boiling water, then into cold water to rest, depending on the size of the eggs. Cook them for a little less time if your eggs aren’t refrigerated. We made tons of garlic toast to go with the salad: toasted bread rubbed with a fresh clove of garlic and olive oil.
3 p.m. Take the long route to Clare
We went on a big, wonderful loop of a circuit around the house. We left the house and walked east, looking at these trail guides. There are so many footpaths across the countryside, but you have to do an intrepid crossing of cabbage fields and things. It took us through some not-pleased heritage-breed cows who were grazing and a huge bull. The farmer ran out to tell us not to worry, the bull had recently injured his foot. Sometimes the footpaths are thread-width. None of it is no-access private property. When you’re walking along, it feels very much like you’re in a John Constable painting. A fair number of his paintings are of the River Stour. The path we took led us into the town of Clare from the northern side.
Clare is a market town on the north bank of the River Stour. This town has a semi-notable little church, and it’s where we were hoping to find a pub that would have the horse race televised. We were all humoring our friends who had placed bets on the race. Hilariously, one of my friends won 300 pounds. But most of us were more interested in the St. Peter and St. Paul’s churchyard and the ringing of the bells that was happening nearby. These old men were ringing the bells by hand.
On the way back, we had a classic all-seasons walk. We got hail, rain, brilliant sun. We encountered the full spectrum of mercurial English weather in various degrees of readiness. I was wearing Blundstone boots, which was a wise choice. You’re mucking across fields, so it’s a little muddy. I took a mesmerizing video of these crazy clouds you only get in England limned in gold. It was storming lightly, and the rain was hitting the surface of the water. It’s better than a meditation app. We got home at sundown and the house was beautifully backlit.
7 p.m.: Make dinner
That night we made our pea, fava bean, and asparagus risotto. It’s a wonderful thing to do with a group. My friends started a fire in the sitting room, and we set out cheeses, crackers, and aperitifs. Then we gathered around, shelling peas and fava beans on beautiful ornate rugs, and made a very green risotto. That night a had the rhubarb galette for dessert.
10 p.m.: Have a dance party
We used the cavernous formal dining room as a dance hall on Saturday evening. My friend Leopold had the divine idea to put our speaker in a metal urn to amplify the sound. It was a huge hall against a small Sonos speaker, but it did work. We had the fire going, and we danced to funk music around this massive table with all the lights out. It was very gothic-feeling. I slid in my socks in a Risky Business move and got a crazy huge splinter. The place is old. It was quite reckless to slide in there. I had a true thorn in my side for the rest of the trip. We had four drunk people trying to remove a splinter from a heavily pregnant person.
Day 3
10 a.m.: Cook a big breakfast
On Sunday we woke up slowly and made a big midmorning breakfast of eggs, bacon, hot cross buns, fruit salad, and all kinds of things. We were planning to go out to the coast.
12:30 p.m.: Drive to the ocean
Merit, the birthday girl, wanted to see the water. We drove out to Snape, a beautiful coastal area about an hour and 15 minutes east of where we were. We bundled up. We planned on walking, so we didn’t bring anything to sit on. The southern coast and Heath is protected. It was a short, beautiful, blustery trip. We were there for maybe an hour, an hour and a half. In hindsight, an error was not bringing snacks. As soon as we got home, people descended on cheese, crackers, and potato chips.
4 p.m.: Pick flowers for the cake
I went out and picked all of these little edible blooms around the property: bright coral flowering quince, plum blossoms, and pale-yellow primrose. Both the flowers and the leaves are edible. While I baked the cardamom cake, I got my artist friends to paint the flowers in egg white, dip them in sugar, and make little crystallized flowers for the cake. It’s a fun thing to do for a special occasion even though it’s a little fiddly.
6 p.m.: Make Fire Alarm Chicken
Merit did a three-month-long stage with my mom one summer, so she has worked in the Chez Panisse kitchen, but I exiled her from the kitchen for her birthday. We did a little simple Sunday roast chicken. It’s a recipe I call Fire Alarm Chicken. You roast it at a higher temperature, almost as hot as your oven will go (400 degrees) for a shorter amount of time (45 minutes to an hour). It delivers moist chicken with great, crispy skin. I roast the chicken on a bed of leeks (two to three inches in length). They receive the juices of the chicken and caramelize into this confit that’s really delicious. The high temperature will scorch any scattered leeks, so I make a quite compact bed. I roasted carrots and potatoes on the side and made a big salad, so we had plenty of food.
Merit’s friend who came from Berlin strung up these confetti-filled balloons in the dining room and made a festive, sweet table. Our friends carved little candleholders out of potatoes for the long taper candles. It’s nice to have a sturdy root vegetable for a taper candle. And we set out tea lights for ambience. Everyone had to get up early to get back to London the next morning, so on this night, the impromptu dance party happened between the kitchen and the dining room while we were cooking dinner.
Day 4
7 a.m.: Leave for London
Waking up this early was painful but beautiful in that house. The way the sun comes through the old, wobbly 19th-century glass and seeing the diffused light over these incredibly misty pastures as we drove home was very beautiful.
Fanny’s English Countryside Packing List
Trusty yet moderately stylish, they’re important for unpredictable English weather.
I always travel with a good knife everywhere I go — it always comes in handy. I like to have one serrated knife and one clean blade. These are very good knives to have in a pinch because there’s nothing like trying to chop garlic with a dull rental-house knife.
Rental houses tend to have extremely stale black pepper. How long has that pepper been in there? That’s not nothing when you’re making cacio e pepe.
I prefer to bring a mortar and pestle, which is a little insane, but essential when you care about making a great salad dressing.
But for a slimmer profile, a lightweight hack is to bring a microplane zester.
Very necessary for a dance party in an old house. If you find a metal vessel in the house, you can amplify the sound.
I also always bring a good bar of soap and face wash to any rental.
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