The granddaughter of the Duchess of Argyll launched her own business, inheriting her notorious cousin’s love of interior design.
Lady Elisa Manners has never met the woman labeled the Dirty Duchess whose 1963 brutal and very public divorce from the Duke was depicted in the hit interior design drama A Very British Scandal.
But there is no doubt that heiress Margaret Campbell, who used her family’s money to decorate and restore Inverary Castle on the shores of Lake Finn, would have agreed.
Elisa, 24, is the youngest daughter of the Duke of Rutland, David Manners, whose mother, Frances, has been Margaret’s daughter from her first marriage.
Her work on the front cover of the Bible was in the French style Marie Claire Maison.
Elisa, who lives in a £700,000 flat in Notting Hill, London, told how it was her family’s heritage that fueled her passion for interior design.
Her website states: “Eliza has developed her own unique style that seeks to seamlessly weave antique pieces and pair them alongside modern and contemporary elements – to create a space that challenges time and exudes elegance.”
A source said: “The Duchess of Argyll may have made headlines around the world with scandalous headlines when the Duke divorced her over her affairs, but she didn’t get the real appreciation she deserved for the work she did at Inveraray Castle when she married him.
“Margaret had impeccable taste for exquisite interior design and style. Inviari was semi-inhabitable until she renovated it and turned it into a beautiful building that still stands today.”
Margaret, played by Claire Foy in the BBC production, spent more than £100,000 restoring the Gothic castle after she married drunken and drug-addicted Duke Ian Campbell.
But, as the drama shows, her life was marked by divorce and described as a serial adulterer after court saw letters, notes about her affairs, and an infamous nude photo of the “headless man”.
Margaret in her heyday was one of the most photographed women in Britain, and like their great-grandmother, Eliza and two sisters, Violet and Alice, regulars in London’s elite social scene.
They spent their childhood at Belvoir Castle in Leicestershire, the stately home that Netflix used to film scenes from the first series of The Crown.
Elisa, who completed a degree in business administration at Newcastle University before setting up her own interior design firm, is no stranger to the public. In 2015, her circus-themed 18th birthday party was featured in Tatler magazine.
The relationship of Frances, Elisa’s grandmother, Duchess of Rutland, had been badly damaged with Margaret as a result of the scandal surrounding her divorce. In 1968, a friend told Vanity Fair that she considered her mother a “nightmare of embarrassment.”
But the mother and daughter reconciled before Margaret died in a London nursing home in 1993.
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