The Book of Esther

Shades of Lancaster and English aristocracy ripple through Esther Cayzer-Colvin’s redo of a centuries-old Wiltshire estate. But it’s her easygoing, singular style that proves a most powerful pedigree.

- CAROLINE DONALD

Accompanied by her pack of four dogs, Esther Cayzer-Colvin is an English gentlewoman of the old school, with perfect manners, a ready humor, and a modesty unusual in this world of self-promotion; even her Instagram is private.

When it comes to the restoration of her late-17thand-early-18th-century home and creation of a garden in a Wiltshire village straight out of a Jane Austen novel, she insists: “I don’t think I have ever had an original thought; it is all plagiarized.”

That, of course, is nonsense. She could hardly not draw inspiration from her family: After all, her father, Michael Tree, was an artist and also worked for her grandmother, Nancy Lancaster, the influential post-war Anglo-American designer and co-owner at Colefax and Fowler; her mother, Anne, set up Fine Cell Work, a charity selling needlework sewn by prisoners, and was sister-in-law of the eternally stylish Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire, née Mitford. But the eight-bedroom house that Esther and her husband, Jamie, bought in 2005 has been decorated in a classic-yet-contemporary, colorful and comfortable manner that is all her own. “Decorating is my form of creativity,” she says. “I used to paint, and in the early 1990s did backdrops for parties, but this is more my thing—I love fiddling around with color.”