‘I walked along the road here, and I said, “We’re not buying a house on this road, never, ever”,’ recalls antique dealer Charles, some 45 years after he and his wife, Felicity, moved in. Such strong feelings are understandable: the building sits behind an old brick wall on a busy road just metres from one of south London’s gigantic traffic systems. But the Grade II-listed house, dating from 1710 and once occupied by Huguenot hat-makers, was, to two people with a feel for the rare and antique, like catnip. After walking out from the viewing, Charles remembers telling Felicity: ‘You’re going to have to do the deed, because the seller knows full well I am irresistibly drawn to this house, and I’m not very good at bargaining!’
Ten years earlier, in the late 1960s, Charles had begun his career at Christie’s, working in the Asian art department. After just a few years at the auction house, he left and went into partnership with a business contact. ‘We clicked immediately, after I caught him snogging my director at Christie’s by the back door.’ Patrician, and from a grand family, Charles’s business partner opened doors. ‘He had the magic eye – he taught me how to look at things.’ He was also flawlessly elegant (‘Geoffrey Bennison called us Beauty and the Beast – and I was the Beast,’ laughs Charles) and, during a spell in Paris, even attracted the attention of a certain Hubert de Givenchy’s then boyfriend, drawing an explosive response from the couturier.
Through travels, inheritance and a lifetime on the lookout, the occupants of this charming home have filled it to the brim with objects. ‘There is rather a lot of stuff,’ admits Felicity. Is there a theme? ‘Well, there are collections of themes,’ she continues. ‘That room is what I call the African Room. Japanese and African. There is a cluster of things.’ The house – wide, tall, set in amber brick – is mostly only one room deep, so that each room looks out on to both a front garden filled with shrubs and hedging, and a larger walled garden behind. There, yew, ivy, wisteria and box mix with relics of gravestones, a stone obelisk and an arch-topped wooden door; a Gothic fantasia belying its urban position.
The house has retained its original wood panelling throughout, with one portion in the study bearing period graffiti that suggests it had been meant for a coffin: ‘Merrily met and merrily part, so farewell Amy with all my heart.’ This cosy reading room contains Charles’s impressive collection of Oscar Wilde books, letters, manuscripts and ephemera. With a fire crackling in the hearth, sitting at a desk festooned with small antiquities – including a 4,000-year-old Egyptian ushabti – and poring over his rare first editions, it must be hard for Charles ever to leave. ‘In my 15th summer I discovered Chinese art and Oscar Wilde,’ he recalls, though the collecting started earlier with ‘stuffed birds I bought when I was seven, from the lady in the next-door village in East Anglia. I’d been doing this since I was born, practically.’ These birds now colonise the ground-floor cloakroom, an extension put in by an earlier owner of the house, together with a further stuffed seagull which the collector bought at auction in Bideford when he was just nine. Several dozen paper Remembrance poppies are tucked into the straw window-blind (‘it just happened, and it grows’), beside years of Wimbledon debenture tickets from his eccentric aunt Olive.
Mezzotints inherited from his grandfather and a needlework map of the British Isles from Felicity’s family, line a tight staircase. Above the cloakroom extension, the couple added a small bedroom. With a Strawberry Hill-like cornice, salvaged panelling that was being thrown out of the house next door, an interior window evoking other Huguenot houses, and an old patchwork quilt, the room appears to have been there forever. ‘Well that’s what we wanted,’ stresses Felicity. ‘It’s a construct – it’s like our life,’ Charles adds.
A first-floor landing closely echoes that of Dr Johnson’s house, both sharing a system of folding panels that allowed the rooms on either side to be connected for large gatherings. The two houses also have near-identical door furniture. An antique birdcage once housed canaries, inspired by those at the Dennis Severs house in Spitalfields whose song in earlier centuries would have drowned out the sound of looms.
Off the landing is the drawing room, which the late business partner of the antique dealer called ‘one of the prettiest little rooms’ in London. With its William Morris sofas, a watercolour by John Varley, and Chinese figures on gilt wall brackets, the room has a grand aspect, in spite of its modest proportions. As elsewhere in the house, the fireplace is sans mantelpiece. ‘No mantelpieces,’ confirms Felicity. ‘That does make one stop and think, when you come from a house which had a mantelpiece – “where shall I…?”’ The tiniest of ridges just about allow for the display of postcards and invitations, held in place by elastic cords. Above hangs a dog painting bought from Christie’s; nearby are transitional Chinese porcelain vases originally from the collector’s childhood home, an early Liberty metal box in the form of a book, and the four teddy bears of the owners and their two children, squashed into an armchair.
On the top floor, there are fewer windows owing to wartime bomb damage – ‘but thank God for that, because two windows on each side meant you had no walls for any furniture,’ says Charles. A boat model and old doll’s house are at variance with an etching and signed note by Tracy Emin and a Damien Hirst poster. As Felicity asserts, ‘We do mix.’ And the kitsch cluster of ceramic Pekinese dogs? ‘Ah! How did that come about? We owned two Pekineses. I don’t know what made me start doing that,’ she confesses. In a delicious Freudian slip her husband adds, ‘My mother was a Pekinese collector… No! A Pekinese owner.’ In the basement is a dining room filled with silver and, naturally, a kitchen housing well over a hundred pieces of Japanese Marutomo and Maruhon ceramics.
Every object in this remarkable home has a story, Charles explains. ‘I get up in the morning and every one of these things gives me enormous pleasure. I can tell you everything about every object. It reminds me of people I’ve known, who I’ve bought stuff from, sunny Saturday afternoons on Portobello Road… and it also reminds you of stuff you didn’t buy, too. The whole thing is a giant cabinet of curiosities.’
