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WITH LOVE & GRATITUDE

I Ranked My Houseguests Based on Their Hostess Gifts

I love all my visitors—really, I do. But I secretly love some a teensy bit more than others.

Plum Sykes

PublishedMar 16, 2026, 10:36 AM EDT

UpdatedMar 16, 2026, 12:46 PM EDT

Updated Mar 16, 2026, 12:46 PM EDTPublished Mar 16, 2026, 10:36 AM EDT

This story was originally published on Substack. For more on fashion, society, and the upper-class zeitgeist, follow Plum Sykes at P.S. by Plum.

I love my houseguests, I really do. But there are some I secretly love a teensy bit more than the others.

The ones I love a bit more are those who arrive bearing genius hostess gifts. By that I mean a pressie that I never knew I wanted but am literally breath-taken to receive. Sometimes, within that small pool of visitors bearing breathtaking gifts, a hierarchy emerges, and it is as though my very own SocialiteRank.com of houseguests has crept up on me.

When I recently admitted this controversial secret to friends, they insisted on checking my ranking, hoping they had made the top 10. Whether they had or not, the concept provoked so much laughter, hilarity, and irrational judgmental-ness that I decided I was duty-bound to share the idea more widely.

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Before I get to the complicated matter of ranking my beloved guests, many of whom have come to stay at my farm in the Cotswolds over the past few months, let me share with you my entirely subjective social history of hostess gifts.

I’m convinced that the concept is mostly an American invention, and only fairly recently became the norm in England. In my thirties, if I was lucky enough to be invited to a grand country pile for a Downton Abbey-style weekend “house party,“ the protocol was this: you showed up on time, delighted your hosts with your company and upon departure you left a £10 cash “tip” on the table next to your four-poster bed (which you had remade beautifully) for whoever would clean the room, as well as popping into the kitchen and tipping the cook, the butler and any other staff personally.

On arrival home, you immediately dashed to your desk while thoughts of the weekend were still fresh in your mind and composed an amusing thank you letter, written using a Montblanc fountain pen with sepia-toned ink. If you were being really old-school, you’d send the note by first-class mail the next morning.

Those who did not leave tips or write thank-you letters were not only severely frowned upon, but they were also not invited back.

The idea that no thank-you letter and no tip could be made up for by bringing a gift at the start of the weekend was not considered classy: no, the Duke and Duchess of So-And-So really did not need a bouquet of flowers (they have a walled garden overflowing with scented roses), or a vase (they have a china cupboard the size of a Manhattan apartment), or a tin of cookies (the “cook” bakes shortbreads and sponge cakes daily). They just want their staff to be tipped a tenner.

But things changed when the Americans and Euros invaded the British shooting scene in the last decade or so. Suddenly, wealthy Spaniards arrived for weekends bearing delicious jamon, a delicacy the British had barely tasted before. Cashmere-clad Italians bestowed pure pashminas on their hosts. Americans arrived with enormous boxes of Cuban cigars and crocodile skin backgammon sets from Asprey. The Brits no longer turned their noses up at hostess gifts but expected them.

The 10-pound tip suddenly seemed irrelevant, because the best guests (code for the richest) brought gifts…and left wads of cash tips.

So, here are my recent top guests, ranked by their hostess gifts, in reverse order. Guests’ behaviour, manners, and contribution to weekend activities do not affect ranking. That’s a different piece, frankly.

3. Jemma Kidd

Jemma is the sort of person who is so incredibly glamorous and aristocratic (she has the title “Lady,” which she is far too cool to mention) that whatever she does is chic. She roams Holland Park in cashmere Loro Piana joggers with her white-blonde ‘Paris bob’ enviously sharp (she has usually just had it cut by Ashley Javier in New York). She works like a demon at her wellness startup while raising three children. She is so high in the high-low hierarchy that she can show up with a house gift so lo-fi, it becomes high because of its low-ness. Let me explain.

Jemma keeps a gleaming Dutch Warmblood mare named Sparki at a professional event yard close to my Cotswolds home. She comes down from London to ride or watch it compete every few weeks. She often stays with me and usually arrives laden with goodies: chocolates, perfume, or candles.

But on her most recent visit, she handed me a rather ordinary-looking small plastic bag. She had an ecstatic look on her face and told me, “Plum, this is the most amazing salt.”

I took the bag. It was an ugly blue colour with "1976 Celtic Sea Salt Light Grey” printed across the front beneath a cartoon of a farmworker harvesting salt on a French beach. It contained 450 grams of lumpy, grey, unrefined mineral salt. On the front of the packet were the words “Gout exquis.”

I had never seen anything less exquisite-looking, and I was underwhelmed. Jemma detected the disappointment on my face but insisted, “Plum, this salt is incredible.” She told me it was the real deal, a natural salt harvested on the coast of Normandy—and that it would restore my body’s electrolytes if I put a few grains in a glass of water before drinking it. Ditto if I sprinkled it on my food.

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I tipped half the bag of salt into a silver dish and put it out for lunch. I sprinkled it on my avocado salad and tucked in. And reader! Let me tell you! This salt was amazing. It was properly salty salt, the kind that pinged off your tongue, and around your mouth and brain like some kind of saline rocket.

It made everything I put it on—whether that was butter, tomatoes, steak, or spinach—taste zingier. When I finished it, I bought more. At $30 a bag, it’s pricey, but a bag lasts many weeks, and I couldn’t go back to the salt flakes I’d been using up until then.

When I had houseguests staying, I’d put the silver dish of ugly-looking grey salt on the table and announce to everyone, “This is the most amazing salt.”

My guests would look at me as if I were crazy, reluctantly try the salt, then declare it was the saltiest salt they’d ever tasted and ask where they could order it.

In conclusion: a bag of salt is a very grand house gift—if you are Lady Someone. If you’re a normal person, it isn’t quite the same. Sorry, it just isn’t.

2. Nell Campbell

I worship the tap dancer, singer, and actor Nell Campbell, mostly because she was in the 1975 cult film The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

I first met Nell when I was a young Voguette-About-Town in New York City in the late 1990s. She had opened the most famous nightclub in the city—Nell’s on West 14^th Street—and was involved in launching the restaurant E&O, which became one of my favourite haunts.

Although she now lives in Sydney, she comes to England for a few months every year, where she has piles of friends, all of whom want her to stay with them for as long as possible.

Last summer, she was staying with the Boglione family, who own the incredible Petersham Nurseries, in Richmond, London, but I managed to persuade her that a weekend in the country would do her good. Additionally, our mutual friend Hamish Bowles was staying across the valley with the art dealer Thomas Dane, and we were invited for Saturday lunch.

“Daaaaaaaaaallllllllllllhhhhhhinnnngnggg!” she hollered in her distinctive Australian tone when she spotted me from the train window as she pulled into Stroud station. If you want to imagine Nell’s voice, imagine a very grand Dame Edna.

Nell alighted onto the platform in a billowing cloud of black linen clothing, with a huge black sunhat shrouding her pale skin and auburn bob. She had tied a large bow of fuchsia-pink silk at her neck, and her feet were clad in flat black canvas shoes. She looked chic in a Comme des Garçons meets Issey Miyake way.

When we got back to the farm, I deposited Nell in the Lilac Bedroom on the top floor—the best guest room in the house. It has curtains that I had made 20 years ago out of ballgown-level lilac silk paper taffeta, a view across the valley to die for, as well as a deep Victorian bath in the room.

Quite a few guests barely leave it once they have installed themselves: my aforementioned dear friend and Vogue colleague Hamish Bowles, whose favourite colour is lilac, spent several months based in the room during the pandemic. He christened himself “The Everlasting Guest.”

Before we set off for lunch, Nell appeared in the kitchen and handed me a bag, saying she had a present for me. I dipped into the pile of tissue paper inside and unwrapped an exquisite hunk of glass, which turned out to be the heaviest, most beautiful paperweight. The top was oval-shaped, the bottom was flat, and the little tiny bubbles inside it formed the delicate impression of floating jellyfish. How on earth anyone had engineered such a divine object, I couldn’t comprehend.

No one has ever given me a paperweight before, but at that moment I realised that I’d needed one forever. You see, I’m a pile-of-papers-with-the-window-open-and-the-breeze-blowing-in kind of girl. I use Nell’s paperweight every day, and I long for her to visit again when I see the glass orb on my writing desk.

1. Chris Black and Jason Stewart

Recently, I had the good fortune to be invited by Chris Black and Jason Stewart to join them on their hilarious podcast How Long Gone. These best friends are the shock jocks of American culture, two dudes who comically and confidently riff on everything from literary fiction to T-shirt trends.

A pair of pop intellectuals, I found them so entertaining that after our Zoom podcast, I mentioned that if they were ever in London, they should invite themselves to the Cotswolds for the weekend. Needless to say, within weeks a date was set, and the visit—soon nicknamed “The American Dude Weekend” by my daughters and me—was set in motion.

I started the whole thing with an atmospheric text using HiNOTE, my favourite messaging app:

They would take the train from Paddington to Gloucestershire on a sunny August afternoon and arrive in time for tea on the lawn—at least that was my plan if the weather held.

I warned the boys that if they ran across a beautiful, aristocratic Irish girl on the train, with miles of wavy blonde hair, that was Tarka Russell, a high-flying art consultant and a ball of fun, who was also coming for the weekend.

That particular Saturday, as the sun beat down from azure skies, the double act of Jason and Chris loafed off the train in sneakers, jeans, and baseball caps, looking more American than you can imagine. Tarka, dressed in some sort of black neoprene onesie, strode beside them looking like an action figure.

I was not surprised that the How Long Gone-rs showed up gift-less. After all, they had never experienced an English country house weekend in their lives, the protocol was foreign to them, and they were in the middle of some kind of European-wide speaking tour, already weighed down by mountains of luggage and equipment. In addition, they were men, and men (in my experience) are not exactly the best givers of house gifts.

Tarka, of course, did have a gift, being an expert and much-invited guest, and immediately handed me the sacred dark red paper bag that signifies only one thing—a visit to the Birley Bakery chocolate shop on Chelsea Green, London. It contained a box of the most delectable chocolates in the world—the Birley “Sticks,” which are bought piece by piece, and priced by the gram. If you’re going to bring chocolates, these are the chocolates to show up with—they’re what one might call In-The-Know-Chocolates.

Needless to say, despite the fact that Jason had just landed from Los Angeles and was God knows how many sleepless hours behind GMT, he bravely soldiered on.

We all went for a walk, wandering up and over the farmland, checking out the cattle as we walked with my two dogs, Twiglet and Raindrop. Jason and Chris, gobsmacked by the beauty and the “real country” of the situation, insisted on stopping at every gateway, at every wildflower, for a photograph. I got it. It’s stunning.

They could hardly believe it when we were able to continue meandering through the meadows beyond the farm along the network of footpaths and bridleways, a kind of wild public access unique to Britain that makes it one of the best places for gentle walking in the world. We then indulged in that very British thing—tea on the lawn, with rugs and cushions spread out over the grass, and then a few people came over for dinner.

Jason, who is a fabulous cook, got stuck in the kitchen and taught me an avocado peeling hack while Chris regaled us with tales of his seriously misspent youth.

The night ended with an uproarious argument over Miranda July’s novel All Fours in the study, a novel over which no one could agree. On Sunday morning, I took everyone to the Jolly Nice Farmshop near Cirencester, famous for its homemade ice creams in flavours like Gooseberry and Blackcurrant. The store had the guys swooning that Brentwood Country Mart wasn’t a patch on it.

Then we were off to The Woolpack Inn at Slad, where we met artist-owner Daniel Chadwick and sat in the sun outside whilst sipping various cordials and local beers. After a huge lunch, the boys departed, and I honestly thought that was that. I’d had a swell time, the Dude Weekend had been a huge success, and, as expected, no cash tips were left in the bedrooms for the housekeeper. But these men were Americans; how could I expect anything else?

So, I was very surprised when, about a week later, a package arrived from Paris. I opened it, confused. I hadn’t ordered anything from France. Inside was a white bag with red raffia handles and the words "Officine Universelle Buly Paris" in red on the outside.

When I opened it, that romantic smell that hits you when you walk into the Hotel Costes in Paris burst out.

Inside were three packages wrapped in the most beautiful paper printed with French script. One had a label attached with a simple, handwritten message: Thank you, Plum. CB. JS. I unwrapped it and found an embossed red box containing soap with a milky, soft perfume.

The next was a long tube of Double Pommade Concréte cream, to soften hands and feet. The third was a tiny rectangular box labelled “Allumettes Odoriferantes” containing long, blue-tipped matches that, on lighting, burst into flame and whose smoke was scented with jasmine, amber, and musk, a perfume named “Retour D’Egypte.”

Honestly, I’d never received a hostess gift so chic or so touching—this is the kind of thing that takes effort.

As if the Buly Paris package wasn’t enough, the boys went on to make a segment in their next podcast about their sojourn in the Cotswolds. They raved about our sunlit weekend and went on to talk about my eldest daughter, Ursula. It was rarely the case, they told each other, that they enjoyed the company of a 17-year-old.

Teenagers, they said, were generally super-duper annoying. But Ursula was “the kind of 17-year-old who gives you hope for the future of humanity.” And if that isn’t the best hostess gift a mother can receive, then, dear reader, I don’t know what is.

Chris and Jason, I take back everything I said about you being men, really, I do. I didn’t mean it.

For more on fashion, society, and the upper-class zeitgeist, follow Plum Sykes on Substack at P.S. by Plum.

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