House-to house battling

Deborah Devonshire

NANCY LANCASTER: ENGLISH COUNTRY HOUSE STYLE by Martin Wood Frances Lincoln, £35, pp. 200, ISBN 0711224293 ✆ £28 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Of all the books on houses and gardens, inside and out, this one takes the cake. Nancy Lancaster was the possessor of those two attributes, difficult to describe but instantly recognisable, of style and charm. Together with her unstoppable energy and plenty of money, she made an indelible impression on one of England’s most envied assets just referred to as the country house.

In her long life (she died aged 97 in 1994) she found herself in charge of houses of all sizes from palace to cottage. Her unerring instinct for beauty, originality and comfort resulted in perfection, whatever the scale. After she joined the firm of Colefax & Fowler, her influence spread beyond her own houses. Anyone who could afford it had the chance to mirror her taste. That influence holds good today.

Nancy was born in 1897 in a cottage next to Mirador, a typical Virginian house like a child’s drawing with added wings. Mirador was the home of her aunts, a large family of beautiful and high-spirited women — the Langhorne sisters (including the future Lady Astor), the Gibson Girls of huge hats, tiny waists and southern charm. It remained her inspiration.

Nancy’s elegance and traces of American accent (she pronounced the h in white and yellow was yalla) and turn of phrase was unmistakably Virginian. In 1917 she married Henry Field, the handsome heir of Marshall Field of Chicago. Five months later she was tragically widowed, resulting in recurring bouts of depression.

After the Armistice Nancy and her sister Alice sailed for England. On board ship she met a fellow American, Ronnie Tree, first cousin of her late husband. Three years later they married and for the next 30 years made a fabled partnership of taste and hospitality.

The first English house to benefit from Nancy’s guardianship (she had already ‘done’ Mirador) was Kelmarsh Hall in Northamptonshire. They leased it because Ronnie had become joint master of the Pytchley hounds and wished to live in their country. Kelmarsh is a perfectly proportioned Palladian house, then in dire need of modernisation. In went electricity, central heating and bathrooms, and Nancy seized the chance to redecorate it completely. She happened on a painter of talent, Mr Kick, who worked for her for the next 30 years. His secret was coat after coat of distemper, which gave some ‘movement’ and a soft effect impossible to achieve by those who copied it in emulsion paint. Her hospitalwhite bedroom at Kelmarsh with the bed trimmed in silver led the trend practised by Syrie Maugham and other decorators of the late 1920s.

Then came Ditchley Park in Oxfordshire. On their first visit in June 1933 Ronnie Tree wrote, ‘We marvelled at it.’ It was love at first sight and he bought it lock, stock and barrel. James Gibbs was the architect and the grandest of big rooms and ornate decoration were by Flitcroft and Kent. Such rooms make their own rules — Nancy abided by them, choosing the best fabrics for curtains and covers to complement their background. She left them lying around in the sun so they did not look too new.

The bathrooms were little works of art. Warm, panelled, carpeted, there were shelves of Chelsea china, cauliflowers, cabbages, tulips and rabbits of exquisite quality: a far cry from the cracked lino and icy draughts which were usual then. There were fires in the bedrooms, the ultimate winter welcome for guests.

Ditchley was made glorious by the Trees. James Lees-Milne wrote, ‘Inside it is perfection. Nothing jars. Nothing is too sumptuous, or new.’ Geoffrey Jellicoe and Russell Page were engaged by Ronnie to remake the neglected garden. This they did on the original plans but, encouraged by their clients, they made some changes. A fouracre kitchen garden supplied the house, and the stables were full of horses, run in pre1914 style. But under the smooth-running surface there were deep family ructions, and in 1947 that creative pair were divorced. Ditchely, as I remember it in the halcyon days, came to an end after only 16 years of fun, brilliant entertainment (Winston Churchill may have been staying, but Nancy was the entertainer) and splendour. Ronnie sold it in 1949.

Luckily for posterity the Trees commissioned the Russian artist Alexandre Serebriakoff to make a series of watercolours of the rooms, with the smallest details faithfully recorded, keeping the memory alive and showing the meticulous care Nancy took in everything. These illustrations are worthy of close study by a would-be decorator.

Estrangement from Ronnie and leaving Ditchley to his new wife to look after was a sorrowful but necessary change for Nancy. A new interest claimed her attention. In 1944 Ronnie bought Lady Colefax’s already well-known decorating business to occupy his ex-wife. With it came John Fowler. Her partnership with him (‘the unhappiest unmarried pair’ according to Lady Astor), constantly bickering but with an underlying affinity, mutual respect, non-stop smoking and much laughter, set the tone in the world of decoration. Colefax and Fowler was a double act of consummate skill, highly entertaining to watch when Nancy and John egged each other on with ideas bouncing from ceiling to floor. It was supported by the most talented workmen and women in the country.

In 1948 she married her long-time admirer Colonel Claude ‘Jubie’ Lancaster. He was their former landlord at Kelmarsh and she was delighted to return to that loved place. But the marriage was short-lived. She loved the house more than the husband, life together became impossible and eventually Jubie winkled her out by turning off the electricity.

For her London life, in 1957 Nancy moved into the rooms in Avery Row behind the Colefax shop. The shiny buttercup yellow of the drawing-room (built as a studio by Sir Jeffry Wyatville) was a stage set created, perhaps subconsciously, for her performances. For she was an actress, an entertainer, who surprised, delighted and sometimes shocked her audiences, always debunking pomposity. During one of her financial crises I went to a lunch she gave in Avery Row for some grand Americans. To their astonishment she said loudly, waving her arm round the room, ‘everything in here is for sale!’ Nancy was now on her own. She had some money through the sale of Mirador and in 1953 she saw over 100 properties in her search throughout England for a house in the country. Fate took her by chance and the wrong directions to Haseley Court near Great Milton in Oxfordshire. In a few days it was hers ‘together with 80 acres and rampant dry and wet rot, all for a mere £4,000’. It had no roof, bathrooms or electricity. ‘Just what I wanted,’ she said. ‘It would have been cheaper to have bought Versailles.’ Within a year Haseley was reborn. Cecil Beaton wrote, ‘Every nook and corner is an off-hand perfection.’ ‘Off-hand’ was her secret, no slavish following of a period, but the muddling together of furniture, pictures, books and rugs, which spelled comfort with candlelight, wood fires and lots of flowers.

She was impossible to work for. Imogen Taylor, for years the right-hand woman of Colefax & Fowler, swore she would never do so again, but was thrilled with the outcome at Haseley.

And then the garden. The topiary chess set was already 100 years old, but the rest was Nancy’s creation. When asked to define taste she answered, ‘A sense of appropriateness.’ But there was more to it than that, evident in the descriptions and photographs of the garden at Haseley, which are some of the best in the book.

The inevitable followed — her money began to run out. She took in top-of-therange paying guests, but often refused to be paid. She could no longer afford Haseley and a disastrous fire in 1970 brought her tenure to an end, so she had to sell.

It was a great wrench. She wrote a glowing description of the garden to a cousin, ending:

Now it is gone. Life is a series of Grand National jumps. How lucky I’ve been to live in such beautiful places and able to make them as I dreamed .... I’ve adored my houses more than my friends (or husbands). We are meant to lose the things we love. Anyway I have no regrets, as I could not have enjoyed it more. It is like the end of a party.

It was the end of the party. Her audiences faded away, but Nancy lived on in the little Coach House for another 23 years.

This book brings back her unrivalled talent to amuse and to make the best of the best.