Make a Home in Africa, January 2008

“It took the safari guide and conservationist Anthony Russell to reify the fantasy for her—‘He made my house happen architecturally.’ It was on an earlier project of his—the award-winning eco-tourist destination Shompole Lodge in the Great Rift Valley on the border of Tanzania, complete with its various prides of lion—that she had cut her interior decorating teeth (‘I had a big hand in Shompole, a huge hand,’ she says). Warner’s rectangular-shaped house is made out of locally quarried stone. ‘It was a little like building the Pyramids,’ she laughs. ‘I mean, we had mountains of stone—and 25 very happy Africans sitting and chipping away at them.’ The output was enough for several other structures: three identical single-room hand-chipped-stone buildings (two guest cottages and a kitchen, aligned in a circle in the olive-tree-rimmed courtyard) and 10 stables.”