Nancy Lancaster Yellow | Whine n Wisdom

Another London peregrination tale. This one is also on the same day I stumbled across the Fragonard in the Wallace Collection.

I deliberately wasn’t looking at Google maps because when you’re in London who needs a map? If you’re lost, you hop on a double decker bus and in no time, some landmark will hove into view and all will be well. But back to Nancy: she was not someone I had much of an interest in other than a mild fascination for American women who came from across the pond to marry well and lead lives of genteel gorgeousness in the English countryside. She was not one of Edith Wharton’s buccaneers, but she was absolutely of that milieu; Nancy Astor was an aunt, and Joyce Grenfell was a cousin. She was celebrated as “having the best taste of almost anyone in the world” according to Bill Paley no less. This sort of high society exaggeration/bullshit is total catnip for me because I am as shallow as a puddle and social climbing tales of the upper classes gets my eyeballs every time.

Oh do go and ask Murgatroyd for another gin & tonic. Have him mix you one too!

Nancy marries a number of times; first husband dies, she then marries his cousin - Ronald Tree, before marrying her third and final husband Claude Lancaster. In between the husband hunter gathering, she becomes the go-to decorator for London high society. Not that she ever called herself a decorator. Heaven forfend; one doesn’t have a career, one has a calling! Our Nancy was both a landscape gardener extraordinaire and a whizz at interiors. She became the partner of the very English Colefax and Fowler firm and practiced her arts at a series of English country houses including her flat in Mayfair which was above the store.

Which brings me to the colour yellow. Browns fashion emporium is now located in the building that once housed Nancy’s flat. The English and their love of understatement because yes, it was never a flat in the manner of a university student’s digs. Nuh huh. No patchouli and weed scent permeating the walls, no months’ old unwashed bed sheets gracing dubious mattresses, and definitely no festering mould oozing from the communal fridge in this ‘flat’.

The star of the show was a room measuring 46 x 16 feet with a barrel ceiling and it’s here, dear reader, that we bathe in the most extraordinary buttah yellah coloured room. One actually gasps when one steps inside. Even today with the room far removed from the Nancy days of yore, the yellow of the walls is an overdose of such primary colour intensity that one instantly understands the audacity and commitment it took to execute.

I stumbled upon this room because I was hunting for a piece of clothing that I wanted to buy in London. Not online, not at some dusty outlet store; I wanted an honest to God in-person experience of buying something sumptuous. Long story short; no luck, not even at Browns but instead I stumbled across a teensy bit of London history on the first floor of the shop. The lovely thing about the room is one only realises it’s there if one walks through all the rooms. The kicker is many of the rooms that are street facing are the most curious shapes and sizes due to its grade II listing. There is absolutely no hint that the majesty of this drawing room is waiting behind a series of stairs and doors if one sticks to the ground floor and doesn’t explore further. And then VOILA! The egg yolk yellow is revealed in all its gooey gorgeousness. The closest I’ve seen to that colour is the buttercup stripe on the Swedish flag and my Dinosaur Designs bangle but not much else.

This year we’re embarking on a gut renovation and we’re to-ing and fro-ing on finishes, and designs, and all the flotsam and jetsam that accompanies such activities. Will we reach for this particular vibrancy for our choices? No. The two of us do not have a compatible colour pallet and bright, primary colours may be my metier but they’re not Ronald’s. And in all fairness, our apartment doesn’t lend itself to showcasing such braggadocio but it doesn’t stop me fantasising. Instead, we have a view that takes up all the oxygen and I probably don’t want to fight that in the scheme of things. We’re going for the ubiquitous open plan living with kitchen, dining, and living spaces all part of one big room but in fairness to us, it makes total sense.

Nancy’s yellow definitively says understatement has never been so overrated.