page_title: Nancy Lancaster
section_title: Third marriage
hierarchical_section_title: Nancy Lancaster / Personal life / Third marriage
caption_attribution_description: English: Haseley Court. Viewed from the lane to Standhill. The house has an uninterrupted view for many miles southwestwards.
context_page_description: Nancy Lancaster was a 20th-century tastemaker and the owner of Colefax & Fowler, an influential British decorating firm that codified what is known as the English country house look.
context_section_description: She married, thirdly, in 1948, Lieutenant Colonel Claude Lancaster (1899–1977), a former military officer, country squire and member of Parliament who owned Kelmarsh Hall near Market Harborough, Northamptonshire. Renowned today for its gardens, it is a popular tourist site and said to be Nancy Lancaster's favorite home of all, despite their divorce after only five years in 1953. The couple had been having an affair for years prior to their marriage. Nancy Lancaster later claimed that it was the suffocating, day-to-day intimacy caused by their marriage that made her realise why they were successful as lovers and ill-suited as husband and wife.
  In 1950 Nancy was forced to sell her beloved Mirador and in 1954 she bought Haseley Court near Oxford. She renovated and decorated the house with the help of her business partner, John Fowler (1906–1977). They also created the famous Yellow Room at Avery Row, Mayfair, one of the finest rooms in London. After a fire in 1971, she sold the main house at Haseley and moved into the Coach House where she lived for the rest of her life. The garden she created at Haseley was particularly famous for its sense of style. The renowned British interior designer David Hicks (1929–1998) called Nancy Lancaster "the most influential English gardener since Gertrude Jekyll." Referred to as the doyenne of interior decorators (something she never was, nor ever claimed to be) and smart gardeners, she together with John Fowler created much of the English country house look.
caption: Haseley Court
  Little Haseley, Oxfordshire
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