Christopher Chown

Chris Chown is a man of many contradictions. He is a romantic and a dreamer who says he was born two hundred years too late. He claims to be disillusioned with the politics and culture of the late twentieth century but he is at home with new technology and exercises a sharp business mind. He was once a member of the Ecology Party – later the Greens – and talks endlessly about concepts like ‘elemental purity’. He hates cities but owns a restaurant in the centre of Bath. He loves modern design and contemporary art, but affirms an equal passion for the classical order and symmetry of Georgian architecture – so perhaps Bath is a forgivable aberration. He is clever with computers but would trade in his car rather than have it go beep at him. Christopher Chown is part-polymath, part-aesthete, permanently in search of harmony in life, and he and his Danish-Faeroëse wife, Gunna, have sought it at Plas Bodegroes, their hidden idyll on the Lleyn Peninsula in North Wales. It is a place of great peace and beauty. But now he is talking of selling.