Nancy lancaster rooms

Nancy Lancaster

US-British interior designer and socialite (1897–1994)

Nancy Lancaster

Nancy Perkins in 1916

Born

Nancy Keene Perkins


(1897-09-10)10 September 1897

Mirador, Virginia, U.S.

Died19 August 1994(1994-08-19) (aged 96)

Little Haseley, Oxfordshire, England

Resting placeEmmanuel Episcopal Church Cemetery,
Greenwood, Albemarle County, Virginia, U.S.
Occupation(s)Interior designer, interior decorator, socialite
Spouses

Henry Field

(m. 1917; died 1918)​

Ronald Tree

(m. 1920; div. 1947)​

Claude Lancaster

(m. 1948; div. 1953)​
Children3, including Jeremy Tree

Nancy Lancaster (10 September 1897 – 19 August 1994) was a 20th-century tastemaker and the owner of Colefax & Fowler, an influential British decorating firm that codified what is known as the English country house look.[1]

Biography

She was born Nancy Keene Perk

Remains of the Decorator : BIOGRAPHY : NANCY LANCASTER: Her Life, Her World, Her Art,<i> By Robert Becker (Alfred A. Knopf: $40; 426 pp.)</i>

Those who know their curtains from their drapes and their pelmets from their ruches know Nancy Lancaster.

Born and schooled in Virginia, “finished” among Europe’s aristocracy, Nancy Perkins Field Tree Lancaster was an inventor of ideas for the home. Her famous yellow room, the 1950s library of her Avery Row flat in London that was painted in a tone she described as “buttah yellah,” became a legend in interior design.

In her lifetime, from 1897 to 1994, Lancaster converted American and British houses, great and small, into the prototypes of a look that would be embraced by an entire school of decorators and, ultimately, mass-marketed by Ralph Lauren.

Blending the pre-World War II sensibilities of England’s lauded elite with the comfortable country accents she recalled from childhood summers in Virginia, she became the queen of “English country style.” Her rooms were elegant but cozy, full of flowers and chintz and something ta

Highlights: Nancy Lancaster — English Country House Style

By Martin Wood, 200 pp.,
color illus., Frances Lincoln, $60



Bedroom at Avery Row. Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire, said of Nancy, "Whatever she touches has that hard-to-pin-down but instantly recognizable gift of style, arresting in its originality and satisfying to the spirit." The fauteuil en cabriolet in her bedroom was upholstered in "Berkeley Sprig," which became the Colefax and Fowler logo.

Swagged curtains, a blazing fire, and the family dog lolling on an impeccably upholstered couch; the studied carelessness of what we know as "English country house style" was in fact the brainchild of the Virginia-born Nancy Lancaster (1898–1994), who recreated her fantasy of the antebellum South in several grand English houses she inhabited before marketing her style of comfort plus elegance to a larger audience through the legendary business of Colefax and Fowler. 

In 1922, Nancy acquired Mirador, her grandfather's Virginia estate. She made sweeping chang

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