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.”
Adam Brown (left) and Tom Konig with their dog, Sunny, in the garden at Pennyholme © Julian Broad
The breakfast/dining room © Julian Broad
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.
