EDEN CONFIDENTIAL: Piers de Laszlo’s battle with cancer forces him to give up his dream of a refuge for fellow artists in Portugal

His mother foresaw a long marriage of bliss to her war hero husband, Group Captain Peter Townsend, but the dream would conflict with Townsend’s duties as George VI’s equerry – and proximity to the monarch’s lively youngest daughter, Princess Margaret.

Now Piers de Laszlo – Rosemary Townsend’s only son from her second marriage – is coming to terms with a heartbreaking loss after a grueling battle with cancer.

To his great regret, it has forced him to give up his hopes of creating a haven for fellow artists and for writers in the Portuguese fishing village of Olhao, where for several years he has been buying up enchanting old houses that would otherwise be in the spotlight . knocked down or subjected to formal modernization.

“I hoped to have an art academy,” says Piers, 65 years old. He is the grandson of the society portraitist Philip de Laszlo, who painted almost all the crowned heads of Europe, as well as Edward VII and a very young Princess Elizabeth.

“The idea was to call it The Crumbling Foundation,” adds de Laszlo, who saved fourteen houses in various states of destruction and inspired others – including the Count of St Germans’ widow Jacquetta – to emulate him to follow.

His hope was to make the houses habitable, but otherwise leave them unchanged. ‘Everyone is unique. The inside is a big part of what makes them so great. That’s where the vast majority of the architecture, the design and the domestic story has gone,” De Laszlo explains, adding that developers invariably keep facades “but tear down everything inside” and create “sterile, open luxury.”

He foresaw the emergence of an artistic community – with perhaps some of the uninhibited spirit he encountered in the 1970s, when, shortly after leaving Harrow, he went to Surrendell Farm in Wiltshire, the owner of which was the sister of the Earl of Bessborough, Sarah Ponsonby, created a commune that attracted Dame Helen Mirren and her then boyfriend, Prince George Galitzine, as well as Roddy Llewellyn, who was periodically visited by his then lover, Princess Margaret.

Now that his dream is over, De Laszlo hopes to find new owners for the houses “they really like.” When they do, he treats them to a bonus, telling me, “I’ll paint their portrait when they move in.”

Harry Styles chills with Taylor!

When things got exciting in between Harry Styles and actress Taylor Russell, he’s certainly found a way to cool them down.

The pop superstar, 29, plunged into the cold waters of the Hampstead Heath ponds in north London with the Canadian, also 29, on Boxing Day.

Both eschewed wetsuits, with the As It Was singer showing off his powerful physique in a pair of swimming trunks, while Russell wore a black unitard.

But they both wore woolen hats plus swimming socks and gloves for their dip in the water, which was a rather bracing 8c. Brrr…

The Sheffield clan are riding out their hangovers…

Having once declared that it is ‘perfectly okay for a man to wear eyeliner to dinner’, baronial heir Robert Sheffield shows no sign of losing his sense of adventure.

“Possibly my favorite day of hunting ever on Boxing Day,” he captioned this photo of him with half-sister Emily Sheffield, former deputy editor of Vogue. “We galloped, jumped and laughed our way out of a hangover,” says Robert, 39.

Maybe he’ll lure his half-sister, Samantha, and her husband, Lord (David) Cameron, back into the saddle? The Foreign Secretary has been rather reticent about field sports in recent years, although in 2019 he reportedly shot a deer – and promptly named it ‘Boris’.

First it was bats, now a curved roof is in danger of collapsing Game of Thrones stars Kit Harington and Rose Leslie‘s plans to convert a barn on their farm in Suffolk.

The couple want to build a huge skylight on the top of the arched outbuilding of their 15th-century retreat. But conservationists fear this will damage the quirky character of the Grade II listed Tudor house. Now the municipality has called for new plans.

It said: ‘The existing roof structure of the shed is very uneven and I have concerns about the implementation of this window – would it be necessary to flatten this before installation, removing its character?’

Clare’s dream home for dogs

Clare Balding loved her posh corner of west London so much that she and fellow broadcaster Alice Arnold got married at the local stately home, Chiswick House.

But now they are leaving the capital for the countryside because they fear their pets will be stolen or killed on the busy roads.

“We bought a new house and are going to tear it down and build it so we have a protected space around it where the doors can open,” says Balding, who longs to replace her deceased Tibetan terrier, Archie.

“The result is that a puppy or a new young dog or whatever can come out all the time and the cats don’t get run over or kidnapped. We change our whole life to suit the dog that comes in.”

Strange events occur in the household of Damien Hirst, whose heavily pregnant girlfriend, Sophie Cannell, feeds the chihuahua from her belly button.

Doesn’t the spoiled puppy know that if it doesn’t behave, it could end up as a Hirst work of art, like the formaldehyde-brined shark or the chopped-up cow?

Former ballerina Cannell, 29, is expecting her first child with Hirst, who is 29 years older than her. She lives with the art world’s former enfant terrible in his £36 million, 14-bedroom home in Regent’s Park, London.