Nancy Lancaster

"I devour books and I have a huge library. As an interior designer you get stimulation from anything. I get stimulus from images and from reading descriptions, like a book about a house or about a collection. This one is a biography of Nancy Lancaster by Robert Becker. It’s a book that is important for English and American interiors and it is a social history as well. Nancy Lancaster came to England from the American South and was nouveau poor. She married into British society. First, when she was 18, she was married to Henry Field, who died after a year, and then she married Ronald Tree. There’s a great passage in the book where she goes to the stationers and says: ‘I used to be a Field but now I’m a Tree.’ The stationer says; ‘How very agricultural, Madam.’ As a divorce present from her second husband, Tree, she was given Colefax and Fowler, a hugely well-known decoration practice. She ran it with John Fowler and they were known as the ‘unhappiest unmarried couple’ in London. The book is then about how she brought American comfort and practicality to these grand English homes, bringing them up to date. She lived at Ditchley near Oxford, which is, of course, very famous for Churchill visiting during WW2 and for being one of the ‘power houses’ in England. Her aunt was Nancy Astor and her clients generally came from her connections and she influenced taste as a result."