The Former Home Of Fleetwood Mac’s Christine McVie Is For Sale

‘I want to be with you everywhere,’ sings the late Christine McVie on one of Fleetwood Mac’s most beloved hits. Yet just three years later, after more than two decades spent quite literally everywhere with the band, she found somewhere she was rather happy to stay put.

In 1990, McVie traded the glamour, chaos and constant motion of Fleetwood Mac life for The Quaives, a 17th-century country estate tucked away in the quiet English village of Wickhambreaux. And now, the very same country retreat McVie called home for 25 years has come to market for £3 million.

Where Stevie Nicks was Fleetwood Mac’s chiffon-clad mystic and Lindsey Buckingham its restless creative force, Christine McVie was the self-described ‘Mother Nature’ at the heart of one of rock’s most prolific bands: grounded and happiest tucked behind her keyboard. By 1990, she had spent two decades ricocheting between studios, hotel rooms and world tours, with more than her fair share of the romantic entanglements and rock ‘n’ roll excess that made Fleetwood Mac nearly as famous for its private lives as its music. Eventually, for the band’s ‘Mother Nature’, the pull of a quieter life won out.

Longing to become ‘an English country girl’ once more, McVie found her perfect refuge at The Quaives estate on the edge of Wickhambreaux in Kent. Despite the band’s best efforts, she eventually left Fleetwood Mac behind in 1998, settling into the bucolic red brick home surrounded by acres of gardens, paddocks and expansive woodland. The historic estate became the place she chose when she wanted to stop being Christine McVie of Fleetwood Mac for a while. And while the band continued on with ceaseless worldtours, at The Quaives McVie’s days were increasingly characterised by the enviable fundamentals of English countryliving: dogs, gardening and cooking over the Aga.

Inside Christine McVie’s Home: The Quaives

Dating back to the late 17th century, The Quaives is a lofty Grade II listed country estate. Surrounded by nature and boasting 18 acres of private grounds, alongside three self-contained cottages, The Quaives had already lived several lives before McVie arrived. Beginning as a country residence and later a working farmstead, today its Dutch gables, exposed timbres and mullioned casement windows still bear much of that history.

In the course of its 300-year history successive owners have, of course, steadily adapted the estate around the way they wanted to live, and McVie was no exception. After buying the property, she undertook extensive restoration work and gradually made the sprawling house and its collection of barns and cottages her much-loved home.

Inside, the 6,000 sq ft principal house wears its history lightly. Spread across three floors, its period bones remain firmly intact, with prominent panelled walls and a sitting room, family room and formal dining room gathered around fireplaces while the drawing room opens onto the south-facing terrace. At the home’s centre sits a generous kitchen and family space, complete with doors leading directly into the gardens. The first floor, meanwhile, is given over in part to a generous principal suite with dressing room and en suite bathroom. With a further six bedrooms and a succession of reception rooms that feel ideal for the kind of long, unhurried country-house stays that McVie had gone in search of. 

The estate’s gardens however, are perhaps where McVie’s retreat from Fleetwood Mac life becomes easiest to picture. Across the estate’s expanse, formal lawns slip into paddocks, woodland and wetland, with a lake, the Black Hole Dyke, mature trees and winding paths made perfect for wandering endlessly through nature. Though in the case of The Quaives, nature certainly doesn’t mean wilderness as the estate boasts all the amenities befitting a rock-star on hiatus with a 35-foot greenhouse, an all-weather tennis court and pavilion, hot tub and plenty of space for outdoor entertaining. 

For all the draws of country life, however, music proved rather harder to leave behind. The privacy and quiet McVie prized at The Quaives also gave her room to create on her own terms, and even the estate’s outbuildings still carry traces of her tenure. Songbird Cottage, named after one of her most iconic compositions, was once home to her records and awards, while another barn, situated at the end of her garden, was transformed into a makeshift recording studio. It was in that very barn that she worked on her 2004 solo album In the Meantime, with The Quaives itself even finding its way onto the record’s cover.

That instinct for adapting the estate around its owner’s passions has survived her. So, in McVie’s spirit, The Quaives’ latest owners, an architect and yoga teacher, followed suit, taking the same sense of seclusion and creative retreat in a more meditative direction by reimagining an 18th-century barn as a vaulted yoga studio. McVie, meawhile sold-on her Kent home and moved back to London, nestling down in Belgravia, where she stayed until her death in 2022. Discover her Belgravia townhouse here. 

Available off-market for £3,000,000. Find out more at app.rexsoftware.com