Princess Diana's brother stops by Beach furniture store

VIRGINIA BEACH

Patricia C. Favero was spiffy. In a royal blue dress and wide-brimmed lavender hat, her white-gloved hands clutching a purple purse, she floated into Willis Furniture Tuesday morning on the arm of her son, J. J.

They and about 100 other invited guests had come to meet Charles, the Ninth Earl Spencer.

Spencer, though, had not come for tea. He was chatting about the 350 pieces in his furniture collection copied from Althorp, his ancestral home in England.

He needs to sell the furniture, you see, to help fund the restoration of his enormous, 500-year-old estate. His current concern is an expensive slate roof.

The pieces are based on antique originals, passed along 19 generations of his family.

Afterward, Favero beamed.

“Hasn’t it been delightful?” she said. “He’s marvelous. Good genes in that family. And I loved her so much.”

“Her,” of course, was Princess Diana, Charles’ late sister.

It was a day tailor-made for local Anglophiles like Beach resident Linda Major, decked out in a black and white polka dot dress and hat.

“I just recently found out about the furniture,” she said and then held up her left hand. “My engagement ring is like Princess Diana’s. I’ve always followed the royal family and have always admired them.”

Spencer did not mention his sister to the assembled guests. He is on his fourth tour to the United States in as many years to promote his furniture line. This was, incidentally, the earl’s first visit to Virginia. He autographed hard-bound catalogues of the Althorp collection – the books sold out before his visit ended – and he signed the furniture itself.

Some people hauled in things they’d bought previously. The affable earl turned chairs and trays and drawers upside down, and scribbled his name on the bottoms.

Gary Cooper, a Suffolk resident, looked on as his wife, Gail, filled a furniture trolley with several small storage boxes to add to a dozen Althorp pieces already in their English Tudor-style home in Lake Prince.

“We lived in England for three and a half years when I was in the Marine Corps,” Gary Cooper said. “We fell in love with England and English things. When we got this invitation, it was a no-brainer.”

William and Audrey Stoken drove from Midlothian.

They bought a box with a checkerboard top and asked Spencer to autograph three books about his family and estate that they brought from home.

“I’m thrilled, just thrilled,” Audrey Stoken said. “He used my pen when he saw it was an Althorp pen.”

“We love Britain,” her husband said. He wore a tie embellished with the Northamptonshire coat of arms, the county home to Althorp.

“When the Queen was in Richmond last year, we watched on TV,” she said.

They have not been to England. Not yet. Krys Stefansky, (757) 446-2732, krys.stefansky@pilotonline.com