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1Farm Fresh
Tata Harper is living a life as luxe and green as her cult-favorite skin-care line. Justine Harman pays a visit the beauty guru’s Vermont compound.
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2Stressed-out executives in need of relief should be dispatched to Tata Harper’s farm in Shoreham, Vermont. After traveling a winding road lined by verdant fields and hoofed creatures, one can’t help but smell the homegrown lavender. And between romp sessions with a trio of Saint Bernards (three of nine pups), Harper’s handsome husband, Henry, whisks guests around in a golf cart. (That’s the most practical way to get around the Harpers’ 1,200-acre spread.) “This used to be under water during the Ice Age,” he declares while whizzing past a football field–size clearing where he, his wife, and some friends played a game of champagne-fueled paintball last winter.
A view of the guesthouse, which was built in the 1920s.
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3It may seem an unlikely setting for a mega cosmetics brand-—Tata Harper Skin-care—that counts Sephora and Neiman Marcus among its 300-plus vendors. But Harper, 38, prefers to have all operations, including distribution, customer service, and product creation (ingredients such as calendula and the aforementioned lavender are grown in her gardens) on-site. “It’s such a paradise,” she says. A paradise that, as Henry, who serves as chair of the company’s board, points out, is only a one-hour chartered-jet ride from New York City.
Harper and brood enjoy an afternoon snack.
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4Buying a bucolic property and running an on-brand business out of it was not the plan when she and her husband-to-be first laid eyes on the place in 2004. The Harpers, both born in Colombia and both then busy Miami dwellers working in commercial real estate, were in the market for a weekend retreat. “The usual getaways felt too commercial,” she says. “We were looking for a place that was pure.” Their choice wasn’t too far off the beaten path. Karl Lagerfeld is said to have a place nearby, and former Lehman Brothers CEO Dick Fuld is one town away. Maybe they do send stressed-out executives to Vermont….
Signage hangs over the company’s converted-barn headquarters; a freestanding screened-in gazebo where Harper’s husband likes to conduct business calls.
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5Three years later, and expecting her first child, Harper told her husband, “Tengo que estar aqua” (“I need to be here”). It just so happened that their move coincided with Harper’s burgeoning interest in nonsynthetic beauty products, inspired in part by her stepfather’s bout with cancer. Five years of R&D later, Tata Harper Skincare was born. “People think it’s an environmental conversation when it’s really a health one,” she says of her all-natural 20-product line, which runs from a $28 lip balm to a $365 sweet-iris-and-snowflake-bulb serum that Harper insists “mimics the effects of Botox and fillers.”
The dining room of the main house, which features an antique wood table.
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6While their business and family (Hunter Laurence, five, Grace Paloma, four, and Tata Mia, two) have grown exponentially, the Harpers have resisted the urge to expand their real estate footprint. The compound includes only four buildings—an 1880s four-bedroom white clapboard main house that Henry quips “looks like a boarding school admissions office”; a cozy guest bungalow (Harper’s society-fixture sister-in-law, Michelle, is a regular); a converted dairy barn that is headquarters for Tata Harper Skincare’s 25-person staff; and another barn housing 70-plus animals. “The buildings here have had many lives,” Harper says.
A vibrant sitting room in the main house.
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7The same can be said of many objects that fill them. The kitchen is overflowing with mason jars, dens are piled high with hardcover books, and kitschy memorabilia is everywhere (one pig-shape plaque: thou shalt not weigh more than the refrigerator). Harper’s office, too, is charmingly cluttered with her trademark lime-green bottles and mash notes from fans such as Gwyneth Paltrow.
Tata's cameo collection is on display in the living room of the guest bungalow.
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8Country living so suits Harper that the couple maintains this as their sole residence. She views her customer as the kind of woman who has a favorite Pilates instructor and browses what’s new on Net-a-Porter. She is, as Harper puts it, “the woman who loves taking care of herself”—and she can live in a South Beach high-rise or on a farm in Vermont.
A pond on the expansive property.
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9One of the family's (many) dogs.
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11The scene inside the Harpers' working farm, which boasts over 70 animals.
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