Decorator Nancy Lancaster, who spread the joy of ‘buttah-yellah’ among the elite

The decorator with an eye for detail, whose penchant for ‘buttah-yella’ caught on across both sides of the Atlantic

Nancy Lancaster didn’t like things to be too perfect. She complained of rooms that resembled museums. ‘Crossing too many t’s and dotting too many i’s makes a room look overdone and tiresome,’ she wrote. Together with her business partner, Nancy Lancaster came to crystallise the English country-home style that found so much favour with the wealthy transatlantic set of the mid-20th century.

The homes she had a hand in decorating read like a National Trust wish list: Kelmarsh Hall, Ditchley Park, Haseley Court and its Coach House. It helped that Nancy could closely identify with her prestigious clients. Born into an aristocratic Virginian family, she spent most of her life – and made her name – in England. She was also social, eccentric and not quite as wealthy as she’d been brought up to be: a familiar feeling to many after World War II.

It was divorce from her second husband, Ronald Tree, that gave her the financial means to buy Britain’s pre-eminent interior design firm Colefax & Fowler from her friend Lady Sibyl Colefax in the 1940s. It was also this purchase that led to her fraught but fruitful partnership with John Fowler. He had the technical brilliance, she had the bulging address book, vision, guts and peerless taste. Her aunt, Nancy Astor, referred to them as ‘the most unhappy unmarried couple I have ever met’.

The pair were jointly responsible for cooking up the bewitching and much-imitated Yellow Room at 39 Brook Street (above) in 1957. It’s certainly a room that packs a punch, even in photographs. The saturation of the ‘buttah-yellah’ walls required some seven or eight coats of paint, topped with a layer of glossy glaze that bounced light around the room. In fact, the pair really went all-in on yellow. They used it to upholster the custommade banquettes against the wall, on the curtains, and to cover an antique loveseat.

As with all Lancaster-designed rooms, it’s filled with slightly shabby mismatched seating. Another signature was her delight in a wealth of eye-catching detail, from imitationmarble skirting boards to walls hung with oil paintings and studded with Chinese vases. ‘Understatement’, she once remarked in all seriousness, ‘is extremely important.’ This is true, but of equal import is being able to ignore one’s own advice. Perfection, after all, is overrated.