Caroline’s considered planting, including roses, Clematis ‘Jackmani’ and climbing vines, softens the stone façade. The house would traditionally have been painted white with black windows and red doors. Instead, Julian opted for grassy green – matched to a colour on an old paint chart he found – to brighten the long, dark winters.Michael Sinclair
‘I came here through ridiculous, romantic visions of being Robert Plant from Led Zeppelin on a misty hilltop, with a lurcher, music drifting out of the house, a glass of wine and a roll-up,’ says photographer Julian Broad. We are discussing why, 20 years ago, he swapped his infinitely practical, two-storey loft on Old Street, EC1, for a 580-year-old longhouse on a remote hillside in Mid Wales. ‘I was thrilled by the awkwardness of this place,’ he explains, referring to the fact that it is miles from a main road and 10 minutes along a bumpy track to even a minor one. ‘All the decisions I’ve made throughout my life have come from the heart rather than anything practical.’
Julian’s trajectory to becoming one of Britain’s best portrait photographers was similarly driven by instinct. Not particularly academic, he discovered photography through a course at secondary school in the late 1970s. He left education at 16 and, unsure what to do, ended up assisting a London photographer. At 19, another assistant introduced him to Lord Snowdon, with whom he worked for two ‘extraordinary’ years. ‘What I took from him was the relentless need to inhale what’s around you’, he says, recalling his second interview, when he was asked to close his eyes and describe his surroundings in minute detail.
Aged 23, Julian set up on his own and landed a regular gig for Pins and Needles magazine, shooting before and afters of readers’ makeovers. ‘I took every opportunity that came my way,’ he recalls. Soon came commissions from cult magazines like The Face, Arena and Blitz, as well as Harpers & Queen, Vogue and Vanity Fair. The rest, as they say, is history. The National Portrait Gallery collects his work and he has photographed just about everyone, from Bruce Springsteen to Radiohead.