Nancy Lancaster: Haute and Humble

Updated October 11, 2024. It has been said that Nancy Lancaster’s favorite things were gardens, houses, and husbands—in that order. A nonconformist originally from Virginia, Lancaster was known for her sharp wit and down-to-earth approach. She never forgot her roots as she shook up the decorating establishment in England with her insistence on pure, old-fashioned Southern comfort. In Vogue’s Book of Houses, Gardens, People, English diplomat and writer Valentine Lawford said, “Anyone so authentically English and authentically American could only be a Virginian.”

With a great passion for houses and gardens, Lancaster made sure that one lured you to the other through the design and location. She never viewed herself as a decorator—in fact she called herself a “percolator of ideas”—yet some of the finest rooms in England resulted from her keen eye and innate style. Similarly, while she was not a gardener by trade, she was once referred to by designer David Hicks as “the most influential gardener since Gertrude Jekyll.”

Intrepid and confident, Lancaster created the English country house style that became so popular in a nation that was not her own. She lived most of her adult years in England, capturing the wonder- fully disheveled, timeworn state of life in those country houses and serving it back to the aristocratic class with an airy dose of elegance, comfort, and patinated imperfection. Through her American lens, she saw what was needed to enhance these homes, such as modern plumbing and central heating, and she transformed utilitarian spaces into cozy rooms laid with rugs, lit by fires, and hung with pictures.

Lancaster’s aesthetic was formed by a nostalgia for the faded elegance of grand Southern mansions that had been left to decay following the Civil War, a situation somewhat similar to what was happening with many great houses in post-WWI Britain. For her own three English country houses—a combined total of 3,000 acres at Ditchley Park and Haseley Court in Oxfordshire and Kelmarsh Hall in Northamptonshire—Lancaster worked first with Sibyl Colefax and Stéphane Boudin of Jansen before partnering with John Fowler and buying Colefax & Fowler in 1944. In each residence, she brought about a welcoming sense of comfort with deep, low sofas and plenty of places to set a drink, a book, or even your feet. Every room contained her ideal troika: a warm fire, candlelight, and flowers.

I have visited all three of Lancaster’s houses over the years and discovered that both her gardens and her homes possess an all-embracing ambience. To witness how she employed the same guiding principles in the design of her gardens as she did indoors in her decoration is to experience a formula for living that blends the two seamlessly and magically.

DITCHLEY PARK

It was in 1933 that Nancy saw Ditchley for the very first time. She was lured by the vast landscape, and once inside, it was as if “everything we saw … gave us the impression of a Sleeping Beauty waiting to be called back to life.”

Initially, Nancy felt the scale of the house was heavy and wasn’t “quite so livable.” In order to overcome this obstacle, Paul Phipps helped with the architecture, and Lady Colefax, Syrie Maugham, and Stéphane Boudin had a hand in the interior design. But the atmosphere was all Nancy. Cecil Beaton proclaimed that she had a “talent for sprucing up … and making a grand house less grand.”

HASELEY COURT

When Lancaster’s marriage to Colonel “Jubie” Lancaster ended, she enumerated 27 items in the divorce papers, including all work to be completed in Kelmarsh’s garden such as plants to be installed and the special care needed for others. She then commenced a search for a new home, and in 1954 she purchased Haseley Court where she lived the rest of her life—almost 40 years. The centerpiece of the garden she inherited with the house was a 19th-century yew topiary garden of enormous chess pieces. The original garden, circa 1530 and later restored in 1850, was one of the earliest known topiary gardens in England. Lancaster’s famous sense of scale and color, always employed with a light touch, is evident. She nurtured the giant topiary pieces and left them to work their magic on a huge empty carpet of grass backed by a ha-ha, a scene that was both impressive and delightful. The simple woodwork in the garden—doors, trellises, obelisks, and furniture pieces—was painted a shade of blue that is pale yet saturated, a hue that ought to be as famous as Jacques Majorelle’s blue in Marrakech.

In her rooms, Lancaster always mixed the haute and the humble innately and unselfconsciously, defining eclecticism along the way but always knowing when to stop. Likewise in her gardens, she counterbalanced formality with wildness. Other friends who advised Lancaster on various garden issues were English horticulturalist Graham Stuart Thomas, English architect Geoffrey Jellicoe, and English landscape architect Russell Page. As a result, Haseley Court included a cascade, a canal, a variety of garden ornaments, and the famous laburnum arbor. Edged borders overflowed with salvias, phlox, lavender, santolina, and verbena contrasted with asparagus and bronze fennel and punctuated by lemon trees, datura, and oleander.

Manicured areas, as thoughtfully designed as the décor, led out into a seemingly uncultivated forest. Roses, Lilium martagon, wild geranium, pink violets, foxgloves, and giant cow parsley added to the color palette. Lancaster also grew big trees of Sparmannia from cuttings given to her by Sir Laurence Olivier. She trained helichrysum petiolatum on wire and created towers of sweet peas. As her rooms beckoned the visitor to linger, the vistas of her gardens also created an atmosphere of invitation at every turn. Part of her genius was the ability to humanize rooms and then do the same in her gardens, creating visual signifiers of her personal style.

Lancaster’s restoration of Haseley Court, in collaboration with John Fowler, was her last masterpiece. There, she transformed a field and created a kitchen garden with romantic pathways leading to beautiful garden rooms—the old gardens of her Virginia childhood emblazoned in her mind, translated and perfected in the English countryside.

VISITING NANCY LANCASTER’S HOUSES

Charlotte Moss travels to the English countryside and experiences firsthand the houses, gardens, and inimitable style of one of her design icons, Nancy Lancaster.

When you love something with a passion, the natural thing to do is immerse yourself in it and learn all you can. Over 30 years ago, prior to leaving Wall Street to start my decorating business, I began to do research on the industry’s greats. Who were the people that designers referred to as the influencers? Whose legacy of great style proved to be the catalyst for subsequent careers? Nancy Lancaster, the pioneering 20th-century tastemaker, co-owner of Colefax & Fowler, and collector of some of England’s most beautiful country houses and gardens, was at the top of my list. Why? Because Nancy had something elusive, that “hard-to-pin-down but instantly recognizable gift of style,” as the Duchess of Devonshire once said.

As a self-described “percolator of ideas” (but not a decorator), and a fellow native Virginian, Nancy was endowed with wit, style, and the instinct to make houses comfortable and to put people at ease. A Southerner to the core, she utilized this blend of qualities to become the great decorator she professed not to be, as well as one of England’s great hostesses.

The closest thing to having a conversation with Nancy, besides a séance perhaps, is Robert Becker’s book, Nancy Lancaster: Her Life, Her World, Her Art (Knopf, 1996). Written mostly from recordings made during visits to the Coach House at Haseley Court, the last house to have her deft touch, it would be required reading if “Nancy 101” was an official academic course. Her pronouncements left me laughing, exhilarated, and enlightened. What I knew before I read the book was that Nancy was addicted to houses; in fact, she preferred houses to people. But her reminiscences were woven with descriptions of rooms, what they looked like, how they felt, and what made them comfortable and as hospitable as a favored slipcovered easy chair.

However, even after my many years of decorating, reading, writing, and giving talks that included my admiration for Nancy, there was still something missing. There can be no substitute for standing in a room or peeking beyond a garden gate, memorizing every last detail, and “feeling the personality” of it, as Nancy said. The smell of beeswax on furniture; the textures of old leather, bouclés, and cut velvets; and the whiff of an antique rose are all keys to imagining a life well-lived there. I was long overdue to experience Nancy’s world in person.

My first tour of Ditchley Park in Oxfordshire inspired me to return again in the spring of 2015 to visit the holy trinity of Nancy’s houses. Using Ditchley as home base, I also explored Kelmarsh Hall and Haseley Court—places where “studied carelessness” expressed itself in pure the-South-meets-the-English-countryside style.

Making Ditchley my home away from home allowed me to soak in the grandeur and charm of the house, as well as feel the palpable passion of the artist that created it. What could possibly replicate the magical experience of hearing Ian, the amiable butler, proudly announce dinner with a smile and the bang of a gong before we made our way down the hall to the saloon? Or the discovery of the evening light streaming through French doors across a timeworn marble floor as we sat down to tables aglow in candlelight and the sparkle of polished silver, with flowers that mirrored the pale smoked-salmon color of the room?

Learn more about touring Ditchley here.

My journey continued with an excursion to Kelmarsh in Northamptonshire, which was said to be Nancy’s favorite house because it reminded her of her upbringing in Virginia.

Plan your Kelmarsh Hall & Gardens tour here. 

Nancy’s last residence, Haseley Court, remains in loving, private hands and continues to evolve, as houses do. Nancy’s touch is very much evident in the garden, as her advice of always including both formal and informal elements continues to guide the current owners. I found that Haseley’s garden, like all of Nancy’s houses, with its rooms, furnishings, and vistas, had an atmosphere of invitation at every turn. Nancy was surely the absent presence.

Nancy firmly believed in understanding the minutiae of life. Her decorating essentials of fresh flowers, a fire, and candlelight spoke to me early on in my career. And her voice still rings loud and clear: Atmosphere is the goal of decoration, indoors and out. She described her decorating as a “salad,” a mix of haute and humble. For years, this is what I have strived for in my own work, with her words echoing in my head. She had the unique ability to relax interiors, and that’s the American spirit she infused in English decoration. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from wandering her houses and gardens, it’s that finding your style is like finding yourself. It comes from confidence—and Nancy had that in spades.

By Charlotte Moss

With a lifelong love of gardening, designer Charlotte Moss has long been intrigued with what draws people—especially women— into the world of horticulture. She has a forthcoming book with Rizzoli on the subject of gardening women, set to release in 2026.

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