She has a lovely figure – thanks to all the cycling she does, I guess. The swoops of pink she’s applied above her eyes even put one in mind of pixie ears. Beneath the hat, she looks pixieish, almost ethereal. It’s momentarily discombobulating, because it makes her difficult to recognise, just for a second. Her hair, usually resplendent in one of a range of shades from pink to screaming orange, is entirely hidden. Not least because she might as well have “Why did I agree to this interview?” embroidered on her beanie hat. When Vivienne herself arrives, I’m quite sad that she’s interrupted us. It was with some difficulty that he persuaded her to take two, so they wouldn’t have to share. He tells an anecdote about Vivienne, out at dinner early in their relationship, saying she didn’t have a spoon at home and was therefore going to take one from the restaurant. She is, he confirms, not at all interested in acquiring stuff for the sake of it, almost allergic to it. I congratulate him on managing to persuade Vivienne to spend some money, and he laughs. “It was a nice flat,” he says, “but small.” It was Kronthaler who eventually insisted that 30 years was long enough and that he was going to find a house for them. At the time when they met in 1989 – Vivienne was teaching him at the University of Applied Arts Vienna – she still had the Clapham flat where she’d brought up her sons, Ben Westwood and Joe Corré.
#Lend me your ears vivienne torrent
Like any keen gardener, he’s delighted to hear his own plot praised, and he’s not averse to offering a torrent of conversation about how the two of them came to live there, behind that exquisite rectangle of joyous cultivation. He breaks off to chat and immediately reveals himself as one of life’s irrepressible enthusiasts, fizzing with fun and energy. Kronthaler is hard at work in the orderly, understated Battersea headquarters of Vivienne Westwood when I arrive, unlike Vivienne, who’s running late. It tells me that all Vivienne says about her partner’s creative abilities, and about their common sensibility, is true. But Kronthaler’s garden is the garden of someone with glorious, exceptional, original visual instincts. In interviews, Vivienne is always keen to emphasise that Kronthaler, 48, is a formidable talent in his own right, perhaps aware that many people assume him to be a young man who simply got lucky.
#Lend me your ears vivienne Patch
The patch in front is the domain of her business partner and husband of 20 or so years, Andreas Kronthaler. Yet even then things weren’t quite as they seemed. The garden, traditional yet stylish, English yet exotic, was the creation of one of the great tastemakers of our age. I’d fondly imagined some elderly plantsman who’d nurtured the space lovingly all his life, or some woman in financial administration who’d poured her wild creativity into this small patch. After some years of really getting to know and love this garden, I found out that it belonged to Vivienne Westwood.
What I really loved, though, was its small but exquisite front garden, which featured extravagant blooms – tree peonies, Angelica gigas and parrot tulips in spring, ripening lemons in autumn. It was remarkably pretty, maintained with enough flair to make it individual but not enough to overwhelm its Queen Anne classicism. A while back, when my youngest son was little, we had a routine that involved passing a certain house in Clapham, south London, a couple of times each week.
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