His mother knew the famously eccentric brothers Simon and Philip Yorke, the last squires to preside over this crumbling time capsule of a house, hardly touched since the 18th century, its glories including Chinese wall- paper and embroidered silk hangings, and Soho tapestries.Ī pair of Elizabethan stone tomb figures stand sentinel at the fireplace in the dining room. The most magical of these, for the young Kime, was Erddig Hall in north Wales. His acquisitions fund for further companions to join him in The Shed came from the old coins he found and traded at a profit, and which also served to fire his histori- cal imagination and research – as did the buildings that he would set off to visit on his bicycle. I hated my parents and I had this shed and I lived in it and it was my refuge and my life. I didn’t like him, actually, but he did have a good shed,’ Kime says wryly. Initially green and then painted black and white, this large structure stood in the garden of his Cheshire home and contained all the curious things that his stepfather had bought back with him from India. The ‘assembling’ bug, however, came courtesy of The Shed. ‘I was thrilled with it, and I still am.’ ‘When I look around the room,’ he muses, ‘I realise that I have collected things that have also been the least expensive… Nothing here is really valuable.’ One of his earliest surviving purchases, for instance, was a screen made with 18th-century Chinoiserie wallpaper, a rarity bought for a few pounds when he was 14. ‘It was in a flower shop that she owned, and I picked it out one day when I was 10 or 12 and she said I could have it.’ His mother continued the collecting tradition but her buying was constrained by a very tight budget. There were wonderful sales during the war where she lived in Hampshire, and she was always buying wonderful stuff for very little,’ he explains, gesturing to the Imari jar on the table now serving as a lamp base. ‘She was a great collector, and I loved her. Kime’s acquisitive impulse, he believes, came from his maternal grandmother, Violet. After our morning together, I came to recognise this same refusal – or inability – to acknowledge any distinction between the grand and the humble in the objects and works of art that speak to him and sit so contentedly together.

Calm, softly spoken and comfortably tousled, dressed in a soft linen shirt and padding around in stripy socks, the still boyish 75-year-old is as relaxed and welcoming as the rooms he creates, be they in a palace or a cottage. Underlying it all, however, is an endearing modesty and egalitarianism. He never knows what kind of object he will be looking at or buying next – that is part of the thrill. No doubt the term sounds too pretentious, too precious and, above all, too studied for someone who depends so much on instinct, but his has been a life lived by the ebb and flow and romance of objects. Yet, just as Kime has never been comfortable with the description of himself as an interior decorator – ‘I am an assembler,’ he says – it soon becomes evident that he doesn’t quite conceive of himself as a ‘collector’ either.

Surrounding us in its sequence of densely hung rooms is in effect a distillation of this lifetime of collecting things, for here are the survivors of an extended period of culling and downsizing. I just had to,’ begins Robert Kime as he ushers me into the sitting room of his London flat. I’ve been collecting things since I was five years old.

In 2021, Susan Moore visited Robert Kime in his London flat, a testament to his own richly varied interests in the fine and decorative arts and to his belief in the importance of creating an atmosphere. Robert Kime, the collector, dealer and interior decorator who started trading antiques from his rooms at Oxford as an undergraduate, has died at the age of 76.

White in lets create pottery