To trace how approaches to historic interiors have evolved in recent decades we need to start with Fowler himself. Although he brought a decorator's approach to the houses he restored for the National Trust, Fowler also took care to collect any scrap of evidence that would help him to reconstruct historical decorative schemes. He used "scrapes to uncover successive layers of paint and thus to discover the colours in which an interior had once been painted (though the more scientific methods in use today often reveal that what had been thought to be the original paintwork was no such thing) Fowler redecorated a number of houses that presented a particular problem because they had been acquired by the Trust with hardly any contents. At Sudbury Hall in Derbyshire (where no original paintwork survived), he decided to compensate for the bareness of the interior by devising colour schemes to emphasize its architectural features. The staircase hall, for example, was painted a strong yellow to contrast with the staircase, which Fowler thought should be white (Plate 136). When the restoration was completed in 1971, the former owner, Lord Vernon, complained that the Trust had drastically altered the character of the house in order to create an interior which they think, regardless of history, is aesthetically satisfying in Jenkins and James, From Acorn to Oak Tree, p.272). Nevertheless, the effect has been widely admired and, so far at least, Fowler's work has not been undone.