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Queen Elizabeth II’s decor taste was ‘surprisingly understated’ – just look at her last photograph
brightly coloured outfit is well-documented. What is less well known is her tastes concerning the interiors of her royal residences. Partly, this is due to circumstance: having become Queen at the age of 25, she didn’t have the opportunity to set up a private home, and immediately took on the extremely costly responsibility of maintaining and restoring the royal residences, rather than putting her own stamp on them (as the King has done at Highgrove and Clarence House, with the help of the late decorator Robert Kime). When the last official photograph of Queen Elizabeth, in the drawing room at Balmoral, was taken two days before her death, it was notable that nothing in the room seemed to have changed since she was pictured there with Prince Philip in 1976, from the pale striped wallcovering, the pictures on the wall and decorative accessories such as the candelabra, to the sage green carpet and the mint green loose cover on the sofa. Indeed, the consensus among those interior designers and decorators who have knowledge of these interiors is that she preferred a light touch, a “make do and mend” approach, and a comfortable, practical environment.“She was of the generation to whom it would be anathema to have a room ‘designed’,” says the interior designer Tim Gosling, who carried out consultancy work for Buckingham Palace.
