The Yellow Room

NANCY LANCASTER and John Fowler were a fractious pairing, ‘the most unhappy unmarried couple in England,’ as Lancaster’s aunt Nancy Astor put it, but their imaginative dynamic brought spectacular results.

- Nancy Lancaster and John Fowler

Not the least of their creations was the Yellow Room, at 39, Brook Street, Mayfair, ‘a tour de force in decorating and one of the finest rooms created in the post-war period,’ according to their biographer Martin Wood.

They came from different ends of the spectrum. Lancaster, the daughter of a wealthy cotton broker, had been born in the leafy Old South state of Virginia and moved to England in 1927. Lacking formal training, she had a talent for redesigning the interiors of large English houses to suit the ends of comfort, as well as elegance, and acquired the oft-quoted reputation of having ‘the finest taste of anyone in the world’. The irony of one of the main originators of the academically doubtful, so-called English country-house style being an American has been much noted.

Fowler was a genuine artisan with a talent for creating stylish interiors, specialising in wallpaper (he painted chinoiserie wallpaper by hand), printing and upholstery. He began working for Sibyl Colefax’s interior-decorating business in Mayfair in 1938, the firm name changing to Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler a year later (as it remains). Although she designed for the elite, Colefax’s views accorded with those of Fowler’s, that ‘a room must be essentially comfortable, not only to the body but to the eye… well behaved but free from too many rules… mannered yet casual and unselfconscious’. He would find another partner with a similar philosophy when Lancaster bought out her friend Colefax in 1948.