68 ELLE DECORA guest room’s
wooden headboard
was made on-site by
the artist Pep Duran
Esteva, and the
throw is Scottish.A canopied bed
and chaise, both
from Stirling
Castle, anchor a
guest suite. Wall
paint, Farrow & Ball
Card Room Green.In a guest bath,
the tub is vin-
tage, the rug
was purchased
in Marrakech,
and the artwork
on the wall is by
Calum Colvin.
Initially she and Devereux began renovating the main
house, reroofing it and adding modern infrastructure,
like a boiler, so that they could have all the luxuries and
comforts of the mainland. Pregnant with their fourth
child, Branson, who always makes the design decisions,
had a tight deadline to decorate the main house, which
has 12 bedrooms, a library with a billiard table, and a
drawing room with an open fireplace and a grand piano.
“I had five weeks to do everything before the baby was
born, so I went to John Lewis and bought 100 towels and
100 pillowcases,” she recalls. Twenty years later, most of
the linens have withstood the test of time. “If you buy the
best, it only hurts once,” she says.
Another design commandment that Branson has con-
sistently followed, whether at Eilean Shona or El Fenn, is
to “start with art.” In the early 1990s, she co-ran a con-
temporary art gallery on Portobello Road in London and
represented the abstract artist Fred Pollock. Near the
end of the renovation process, she invited Pollock to the
island to paint an exuberant abstract mural in the din-
ing room and then used the palette of those bold colors
to inspire her design decisions for the rest of the house.
That meant orange-painted walls in a bathroom and red
Moroccan carpets and a gilded armchair upholstered in a
turquoise silk in the sitting room. “The juxtaposed colors
really make the rooms vibrate,” Branson says.
A few years ago, with her children all grown up and no
longer vacationing regularly at Eilean Shona, and with