Eiesha Bharti Pasricha is seated in an upstairs nook at Maison Estelle, the enigmatic Mayfair members club founded by her husband, hospitality entrepreneur Sharan Pasricha. The Grade I listed Georgian townhouse is one of London’s best-kept secrets: a labyrinth of creaking corridors that open into rooms of maximalist opulence layered with art, lacquered wood, and bursts of green foliage. Phones are stickered at the door, all photography forbidden; nothing of the interior is ever shared online. The house belongs to Estelle, her “partly historic, partly fictitious” muse, Bharti Pasricha, who came on board as her husband’s creative collaborator, tells me. “Estelle is a woman who never got married. She has many lovers. She is a woman of the world, nomadic,” she continues over a steaming cup of fresh mint tea. “Everywhere she goes, she collects something: an antique piece, fabrics… everything goes into her trunk, and she comes home.”
If Maison Estelle is her London salon, then Estelle Manor is her sprawling country escape. Just an hour and a half outside the city, the 108-room hotel and members’ club occupies the former Eynsham Hall estate in Oxfordshire. A mix of Edwardian bones and bold contemporary touches, the manor—jaw-dropping in its old English grandeur—opened in 2023 as a rural escape, complete with four restaurants, a Roman-style bathhouse, and rolling parkland. Bharti Pasricha describes herself as its “co–creative director,” along with her husband. “[The question was,] how do I make this feel like you’re coming to Estelle’s home? [Like] you are actually going to visit her country house?”
Bharti Pasricha’s aesthetic instincts were shaped by a childhood divided between New Delhi and Scotland. The daughter of telecom billionaire Sunil Bharti Mittal, founder of Bharti Enterprises, she grew up moving. “I see myself firmly as an Indian girl. I’m very loyal to the fact that I’m an Indian,” she says. “But I do think being born in Scotland and having visited the country every year for two and a half months when I was growing up taught me the importance of silence.” India, she recalls, was all “color and chaos,” while Scotland was “raw and still.”
Her taste is partly the result of this cultural mélange, but Bharti Pasricha has always had an eye. As a child, she lingered over how a table was laid or flowers were arranged, but never imagined these instincts could shape a career. Instead, she studied politics and French at university, briefly considering work at the UN, before pivoting to fashion and backing a roster of young designers. It wasn’t until her husband took over the iconic Gleneagles hotel in Scotland that her sensibility found its canvas. She began feeding into the hotel’s look and feel—adding a “feminine” touch—and quickly became hooked.
“I come in across all the creative aspects, from the art, uniforms, tableware, events, floristry to name a few, alongside helping to build the membership community,” she explains. At Estelle Manor, her influence is in the sensorial details. She developed a bespoke line of spa products and worked with perfumer Lyn Harris to create a house fragrance that lingers from the moment guests step into the car at Oxford station. Even the minibar became an obsession, labored over for a year and a half, and stocked with the finest silk scrunchies, tinctures, and face masks.
Two years after the manor’s opening, Bharti Pasricha struggles to sit still. This year, to keep the fantasy of Estelle alive, she launched Lady E, an extremely limited capsule of tailored pieces made in Naples. Guests at the Manor will be able to shop the line at the Muse, a newly opened concept store on the property. “Estelle’s world is never static, because she’s never satisfied,” Bharti Pasricha concludes. “And in some ways, that is my personality, too. Maybe she’s my alter ego.”
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