An Oversight

Just when you might have thought my Mitford sister obsession was beginning to wane I ran across these.

This is the unsettling thing about going through the vintage magazines, pulling what I like and pitching the rest.

I had a small stack that I had not recycled and while flipping through them one more time I realized that I had missed this layout on Chatsworth which was at the time the home of the eleventh Duke and Duchess of Devonshire. 

 The Duchess, the Hon. Deborah Mitford, is the youngest, and from all accounts the most conventional, of the sisters.

Chatsworth was the Duke's family home and it fell to Andrew and "Debo" in 1950 when they were thirty.  Wise beyond their years they allowed the house to guide them through the much-needed renovations.

According to the Duchess,"To have tampered with the library, for instance, would have been criminal."  Agreed.  

While she did not use a decorator or a gardener, "It seems pointless to employ someone to do something I can do myself," the home did have a full-time indoor staff of forty-two.

With the Duke's death in 2004, the Duchess moved into a cottage on the estate.  You can see images of her new home, and the re-purposing of some of these furnishings, in a post that Jennifer Dwyer of the Peak of Chic did last year.

Images, Architectural Digest, December, 1979; photography by Derry Moore.