Nancy Lancaster
American interior designer (1897-1994)
Nancy Lancaster (10 September 1897 – 19 August 1994) 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.
Biography
She was born Nancy Keene Perkins as the elder daughter of Thomas Moncure Perkins, a Virginia cotton broker, and his wife Elizabeth Langhorne, a daughter of Chiswell Langhorne. Her birthplace was Mirador, the estate farm of her maternal grandfather, in Greenwood, near Charlottesville, Virginia. She was brought up in Richmond, Virginia and New York City. Nancy Lancaster had four maternal aunts, of whom the most notable were Nancy, Lady Astor, a British politician, and Irene Gibson, wife of artist Charles Dana Gibson, who popularized the Gibson Girl. Her cousin Joyce Grenfell was a celebrated British monologuist and actress. Nancy was graduated from Foxcroft School in Middleburg, Virginia in 1915, which was founded by her distant cousin, Charlotte Haxall Noland.
Personal life
First marriage
Nancy was first married, on February 7, 1917, to Henry Field, a grandson of Marshall Field, the wealthy founder of the Chicago department store. He died five months later on July 8, 1917 at age 22 at Presbyterian Hospital in New York City following an operation.
Second marriage
In 1920 Nancy married journalist and investor Ronald Tree (1897–1976), a cousin of her first husband.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Nancy Lancaster” as american interior designer (1897-1994). Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the people & ideas register because the source frames it as american interior designer (1897-1994). Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6962795. VIAF identifies the subject as 96294851. The Library of Congress control number is n95066919. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1897, 1994, 1915 and 1917.
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This entry incorporates text from “Nancy Lancaster” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.