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for the style of the entire house,” explains Georgia, who,
with her blonde bob, wide brown eyes, and twinkling smile,
has the face of a ’30s heroine. “From the outside, Badmin-
ton looks palatial, with its Palladian-style façades, but the
interior feels informal. When Harry’s parents did it up in
the 1980s, they weren’t afraid to make it cozy, but they had
the taste to retain the elegance. So there are grand things
and comfy things.”
Perched on the edge of a squidgy sofa upholstered in a
dusky Colefax floral, Georgia has a notebook on her lap
and an erasable pen in hand—“a key piece of kit,” she
informs me, an amused look on her face. Dressed in skin-
ny olive-green pants, a cotton shirt, and white Converse
sneakers, Her Grace (as duchesses
are known in the U.K.) has been
in situ for only a year, but with her
husband she is hosting the Olym-
pic-qualifying Badminton Horse
Trials this coming weekend for the
second time. The 10-day run-up has
HIGH VOLUME
The library contains
a spectacular
collection of books
and albums,
ancestral portraits
and photographs.
he Duchess of Beaufort is the kind of
woman who manages stressful moments by telling her
husband, Harry, the 12th duke, that “I need to do a Latin
translation.” “It’s a metaphor for doing something I can
control,” she tells me. “Although sometimes I do go and
look at a Latin poetry book.”
Georgia Beaufort and I are in the Yellow Room, a.k.a.
the Duchess’s Sitting Room, at Badminton House, Glouces-
tershire, the seat of the Somerset family since the 1600s,
on a sunny Tuesday in early May. In two days’ time, she is
expecting 800 for drinks, then 33 guests to stay for the week-
end, as well as 80 for lunch and 40 for dinner on Saturday,
but the duchess is so happily relaxed that this visitor has to
assume she has been meditating on Ovid’s Metamorphoses
for weeks prior. A welcoming fire dances in the grate, the
mantelpiece above which hangs a Reynolds depicting the
5th duke and his tutor, and the walls are adorned with
family oils. A laptop is open on Georgia’s leather-topped
desk, strewn with recipes, books, family photographs, fabric
swatches, letters, and invitations. “This room is a metaphor
T
