He is also, Margarita notes, a ‘great photographer’, who has always been keen to ‘carry on Grandpa’s love of photography with Charles and me. He [has always] encouraged us to take photos.’ The three kept in contact over lockdown by sending each other a photo a day of ‘anything. Just weird and random things [that we] found interesting. It became a little bit competitive.’
Brother Charles, born in 1999, went to Eton and Loughborough University and is now a musician. ‘He is very into his orchestral music. He is self-taught [and he] can sing, play the piano and the guitar. It’s wonderful,’ says Margarita. ‘Somehow he combines it all together – including online choirs – on his laptop into one piece of music.’ Serena is an artist too: a sculptor. ‘She does animals,’ says Margarita. ‘She won’t sell them, but they are really nice things to give. She’s always had a passion for art.’ After all, Serena, who grew up in Chelsea, Monaco and Ireland, went to art school in Florence before joining Sotheby’s and then Armani, before she married David.
Margarita’s parents – who announced their ‘amicable’ divorce in 2020 – met when her Irish grandfather, the 12th Earl of Harrington, asked David to design furniture for him. Their 1993 wedding at St Margaret’s Westminster was a stellar affair attended by 650 guests, including Elton John, the Aga Khan and King Constantine II of Greece, alongside the British Royal Family. They settled in London, where Margarita spent her early life, with weekends in Gloucestershire on the Bamfords’ Daylesford estate, and she has always remained close to her maternal grandparents – the earl and his equestrian ex-wife, Virginia Freeman-Jackson. ‘My grandmother was a very natural, very talented rider,’ she says. ‘Anyone is thrown on a horse in Ireland at the age of zero.’
Lady Margarita Armstrong-Jones attended Garden House, the good-manners prep school near the family home in Chelsea, then the leading Catholic boarding school St Mary’s Ascot, but it didn’t suit her. She moved to Tudor Hall at the end of Year Nine. ‘St Mary’s Ascot wasn’t very me,’ she says. ‘It’s one of those schools where you mould to it rather than it moulds to you, whereas Tudor Hall was the opposite. It was the most fun. You can really become your own person there. I’ve got the closest friends from both schools, but Tudor Hall was just heaven.’ For A-levels, Margarita studied photography, history of art and jewellery design: ‘I loved all of them, [they were] really interesting.’