about 20 years ago i decided to
move from london and come and live here
in this idyllic island of jersey
i work over a sort of rolling period of
time
transforming this early 17th century
granite cottages
into something rather different
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in the mid 1970s i was invited to
have a permanent job in their newly
formed auction house other biz belgravia
worked directly with peter wilson the
chairman
shortly after that i set up with three
colleagues what has now become known as
the client advisory services department
which is the
heart rally of all the auction houses
there were no computers in those days we
went through about a hundred years of
valuations
i decided to leave in 1980
and currently i have the great pleasure
to be chairman of the masterpiece fair
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at home i put together quite an
interesting collection i mean very mixed
furniture silver sculpture painting
colored ornamental stones pre-dynastic
egyptian
renaissance contemporary art you get
dialogues between countries
shapes fashions and styles
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the entrance hall gives you a real sort
of shock
really when you arrive it goes all the
way up to the roof and has a gallery
around the top
it shows my paw free objects after
fabulous advantage
i particularly interested in coloured
ornamental stones
reading a lot doing your research
talking to people
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then you go into the drawing room
the room is sort of used for
entertaining a great deal so it's not
over full of furniture
the most exciting thing in that room is
a wonderful mahogany
display cabinet which was designed by
thomas hope one of my heroes
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my favorite piece of silver a pair of
small
gilt silver waiters these are objects
that
vanished in the 19th century until i
tracked them down
whilst for some it might seem perhaps
potential seeking off 18th century 19th
century
flatware any work of art and a piece of
furniture piece of silver
painting was meant to be lived with to
be used to be saturn to be eaten off
there's no point in having these things
unless you
not only handle them and appreciate them
for the works of art they are
my parents lived here and i
inherited the house after my stepmother
moved out after my father died
we basically removed everything
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we dug a tremendous hole into solid rock
and constructed what below is a garage
and my wine cellar we built above
this room specifically to house my
library of art books
you come into the much darker lower
stucco room painted really to simulate
the influence of a
of a tomb
then the doors open and you get this big
surprise
full of different colored marbles and
this incredible floor some ancients and
some
some modern this room is really a homage
to
my taste for marble and stone
amongst my favorite things is a really
wonderful
egyptian granite farm it relates to a
whole series of vases
put together in the galleria delicate
library in the vatican
i have a lot of interesting fragments
here they stimulate the imagination
the figure of a lion first century a.d
beautifully veined
reflects the a figure of
ramses the third
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in the construction the whole bank had
collapsed and
it allowed us to build out two meters to
add a another little room
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i was lucky enough to be able to acquire
about 25
years ago the pair of vellum books
the holy grail of the marble world the
stones
have retained the eccentric shape with
which he found them
i will go through phases where i just
read you know a lot every day for a few
weeks
just randomly pick out books and it's
that sort of serendipity that always
provides inspiration
as a child every summer i was sent off
to say with my
grandfather he started collecting in the
1950s tiny ceramics
in the evenings he would get out of a
cupboard a
piece of porcelain and he then melted
he was no longer the slightly
frightening patrician
grandfather and he became this great
passionate collector
that really set me becoming fascinated
and interested
i am almost 68
in about 10 days i probably get the
such an unutterably deep pleasure by
living with
the beautiful works of art not only just
in the terms of their pure visual beauty
but the cultures with for which they
were originally conceived
the hunt for objects the romance of the
history
i do occasionally sell things and once
that moment has gone they've gone
i would feel bereft without them
however you know in the event of
some awful you know unavoidable
natural disaster it would be one's books
that i would hang on to for never and
ever because that
ultimately is the source of one's
knowledge and enjoyment
you