Ditchley Park

Ditchley is a country house and estate near Charlbury in Oxfordshire.

The estate was once the site of a Roman villa. Later it became a royal hunting ground, and then the property of Sir Henry Lee of Ditchley, who had an estate there from 1583 on. He was visited there by Elizabeth I.

George Lee, 2nd Earl of Lichfield, built the present house, designed by James Gibbs, in 1722. In 1933, the house was bought by an MP, Ronald Tree, whose wife Nancy Lancaster redecorated it in partnership with Sibyl Colefax. During the war, they allowed their friend Winston Churchill to use the house as his country retreat, as it was hard to spot from the air. Later, Tree sold Ditchley to Sir David Wills of the tobacco family, who set up the Ditchley Foundation, for the promotion of international relations.

Ditchley once provided lodging and access to the royal hunting ground of Wychwood Forest. In September 1603 James I dined with Sir Henry Lee at Ditchfield. The present house was erected in 1722 for George Lee, 2nd Earl of Lichfield and was designed by James Gibbs.

Occupants of the Ditchley estate have included:

He commissioned the Ditchley Portrait of Queen Elizabeth, which shows her standing on a map of the British Isles, surveying her dominions; one foot rests near Ditchley in Oxfordshire, to commemorate her visit to Sir Henry Lee there. He was later noted for refusing to receive his monarch a second time, because of the expense.

In 1933 after the death of the 17th Viscount Dillon, Ditchley was bought by Anglo-American Ronald Tree and his wife, the celebrated decorator Nancy Lancaster. It was the decoration of Ditchley which earned Nancy the reputation of having "the finest taste of almost anyone in the world." She worked on it with Sibyl Colefax (Mrs Bethell of Elden Ltd having died in 1932) and the French decorator Stéphane Boudin of the Paris firm Jansen.

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