In the early decades of the 20th century, the Virginia-born tastemaker Nancy Lancaster (1897-1994) created an interior aesthetic we now know as the Country House style. Based on a nostalgia for her family home, Mirador, and responsive to the cultural shifts of the post-World War I era, the style conflated ideas born of the Lost Cause and the Lost Houses – the post-war demolition of the great English estates and their pre-war lifestyles. This talk considers the style’s narrative and material composition as symptomatic of an era and Lancaster’s idealization of “home.”
