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-17th-and-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.”
The Grade II (England’s second-highest historic listing) redbrick manor house was in a state of gentle decline when the couple first saw it (they counted 27 buckets collecting rainwater on the top floor). But it has since been “reroofed, replastered, replumbed, rewired, re-everything,” says Esther, noting the addition of a handsome new drawing room wing. Each space is filled with art, paintings, and furniture, much of it made by creative friends or inherited. A fire destroyed Tangley House, Jamie’s large family home in Hampshire, so there are only a couple of pieces from his side. “It is terribly sad, but let’s always try and look at the good things,” he says. “It allows you to go off and collect your own stuff: So much here is an aide-mémoire of where we have been or what we have done.”
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Although it might have been easier to bring in a professional designer (her cousins Jane Churchill and the late Melissa Wyndham, for example), Esther was determined to orchestrate the decor herself. “If one person does a house, you feel it has their signature and everything fits,” and it is her dogged attention to detail that makes the place so personal. Manifestations include commissioning manganese tiles from Delft for the kitchen fireplace to tie in with the painted feathers of an antique porcelain duck she and Jamie bought in Paris; mixing greens with her friend Alice Clark, a specialist decorative painter, for stippling the walls of the sitting room until they got a particular cooking-apple hue she remembered from a photograph; or making sure the chinoiserie wallpaper from de Gournay that seems to bring the outside into the entrance hall had no depictions of man-made objects or blue in it, except for the birds and butterflies. “I wanted it to be silver, with not too much going on. It feels like air; I like it being a bit more uplifting.”
It is the same in the four-acre garden, much of which she designed with her friend Frances Rasch, of Heale House in Wiltshire. With no views to write home about at the back, she has created a series of “rooms” hedged by yew and beech that turn the garden inward and create their own microcosm. “The indoors merges into the outdoors, and it works very well,” says Jamie.
Having visited Nancy’s native Virginia, Esther ensured “the colonies” returned home. Two white clapboard pavilions near the swimming pool are based on a garden building at Colonial Williamsburg, which was built at roughly the same time as the house, the ogee shape of their cedar-shingled roofs echoing in the green-oak fruit cages in the kitchen garden.
Step Inside Esther Cayzer-Colvin's Colorful and Historic Wiltshire Estate
“We drew lots of ideas from Williamsburg: that simplicity, which is very much what my grandmother brought into her gardens,” says Esther. “They were never a ‘statement’.” Whether it is by osmosis or the straightforward lifting of ideas that she declares it is, she has learned well from the best.
Featured in our March/April 2022 issue. Interior Design by Esther Cayzer-Colvin; Architectural addition by Gerald Steer; Landscape Design by Frances Rasch and Crocus; Photography by James McDonald; Produced and Written by Caroline Donald.
