Nancy Lancaster : English Country House Style

In this book Martin Wood explores Nancy Lancaster's contribution to the arts of interior decoration and garden design by carefully analysing her own houses and gardens - large and small - and her work for Colefax and Fowler, the decorating business she bought from Sibyl Colefax in 1944. He also chronicles her remarkable life: her three very different marriages ('I was always better at picking butlers and husbands'); her dynamic design partnership with John Fowler; her interactions with friends and guests including her aunt Nancy Astor, Duff and Lady Diana Cooper, the Duchess of Devonshire (then Deborah Mitford), David Niven, Anthony Eden and - in the darkest days of the Second World War - Winston Churchill.
The story is illustrated by a collection of images of Nancy, her houses, her gardens and her friends, by celebrated artists and photographers of the era, including John Singer Sargent, John Lavery, Alexandre Serebriakoff, Cecil Beaton and Horst P. Horst.

Nancy Lancaster has long been a shadowy eminence whose reputation as a gardener has been hinted at more than studied. The author puts forward the case that she created the English country house style and has been the most influential gardener since Gertrude Jekyll.