It is a Sunday morning in early May when Hannah Kime greets me at the door of Robert Kime’s flat on Warwick Square, SW1, to talk about her father’s lifetime of collecting. She has spent the previous night here and tells me that, despite the fact she has never lived here, it smells like home the moment she walks through the door. Many of the pieces moved from house to house with Robert and his family – his wife Helen Nicoll and their children, Hannah and Tom – and so, as Hannah explains, ‘the memories are very rich’.
The flat is jaw-droppingly beautiful; every surface filled with objects, all extraordinary in their different ways – even five conkers carefully arranged on a leaf among a grouping on the table in the hall. But, as Hannah points out wistfully, the flat ‘is him’ and it cannot be preserved as a shrine to her father. She and her brother Tom, who lives and works in Sydney, have taken the difficult decision to sell it and their much loved house in France, La Gonette. Hannah is careful not to let slip which few pieces the family will be keeping. It is clearly highly emotive, but she is open and generous with her time and memories of her childhood, enriching my understanding of this great collector and tastemaker.
Family holidays would often be spent on some quest or other. ‘If Dad saw a sign to a vide-grenier in France or a ruin down a track somewhere, he couldn’t not go and see it,’ she says laughing. ‘One of the most exciting things was when we went off-piste and found ourselves on a mission.’ On a visit to Luxor, having seen what they had come for, they went to Aswan in search of the ‘unfinished obelisk’ Robert had read about as a boy. ‘It was exhilarating,’ Hannah recalls. ‘For Dad, it wasn’t always about buying things, it was also about the gathering of visual information and the looking. My brother and I would often play a game where our father would ask us which three things we would bring home if we could. He didn’t influence our choice: he was teaching us to look and to have a discussion.’
As a child, Hannah had a museum of sheep’s bones and fossils in her bedroom. She was always encouraged to collect. For Robert, and so for his family, collecting was a way of life. ‘Dad was very much in the conversation with me, helping me in the search,’ she remembers. ‘He would often help me to rearrange my room. I was in charge, but we would do it together – he didn’t have
to agree. Knowing I was interested in looking and that I felt deeply about where to place things and how to make them work in the room was enough for him.’
Robert and Hannah shared a love of ancient history. When she was about to take her classical civilisation A level, he suggested a trip to Greece. Hannah recalls reading the Odyssey aloud while they drove through mainland Greece to find places it described. On a visit to Venice for her 16th birthday, Hannah kept a diary. She reads me an extract she had found the night before: ‘By the end of the first day, I don’t think my feet knew what had hit them. But with Daddy as your guide, it was impossible to stop. He was wonderful, so enthusiastic. He really wanted me to understand everything I went to see and love it as much as he did.’
When I ask what drove her father’s passion for collecting, she responds, ‘For him it was all about the hunt, the promise of finding something electrifying, then the joy of bringing whatever treasure it was into the fold and finding its place. It was innate – we couldn’t have stopped him even if we tried.’ One year, he found a fallen 350-year-old elm tree. His birthday present for his wife, Helen, was to have the three-tonne tree trunk transported by lorry and craned into their garden. It later moved with them to their next house.
Hannah talks about the pieces that surround us – as we sit in his dining room in Warwick Square – as though they are family friends. ‘He would talk to them. We all would and we still do. They are woven into our lives.’ Dene House, where the family lived in the 1970s and 1980s during Hannah and Tom’s formative years, was the place seen as their childhood ‘home’, but Robert and his wife Helen were collectors of houses, too. While pieces got sold or moved on, many came with them through the different houses, taking on new lives as they found new places.
As Hannah explains, for Robert, it was as much about the relationship between objects, the dialogue between pieces, as it was about an individual item, and it was this that defined his approach to decorating and collecting. ‘He understood how something could be brought to life by its relationship with others – something not necessarily special on its own would suddenly zing next to something else.’ Certain things always stayed together, Hannah points out, like the cassone (marriage chest) and blue pot in the hall, as Robert clearly derived pleasure from the dialogue between these two objects.
There is a strong sense that his Warwick Square flat is a distillation of a life’s work. ‘When I stand here now, my father is still alive in this collection,’ says Hannah. ‘His devotion to beauty and his respect for the story of a piece and the energy that it brings with it is so powerful here.’ After Robert suffered a stroke and the loss of his wife in quick succession, this was a place where he could feel safe and, as Hannah points out, it did not need to be practical, it just needed to please him. ‘He would walk round these rooms and rest his hands on things, all the time checking, talking and always appreciating. The joy he would feel from each thing never waned – something might retire for a bit, but it would find a new lease of life somewhere else.’ Later, Hannah says to me as we walk around the flat, ‘He taught me how to make your surroundings into part of your support, to nourish you.’
We touch briefly on La Gonette. It was bought by Helen – who was a successful children’s writer and audiobook entrepreneur – as a ruin, having been damaged by a fire in the 1950s. ‘It is the most beautiful place I have ever lived – there’s something about the light and the feel of the house. I think a part of us will always live there,’ Hannah muses. We talk for a moment about the wonderful marble-topped table that was the heart of the kitchen there. ‘It was a piece that Dad couldn’t sell, but it came home for a large family gathering one day and stayed with us through all the places we lived. Once people saw it in use, he was asked again and again if he would sell it.’
Hannah and Robert discussed attachment to things and letting them go. Robert was always acutely aware of the history of a piece and, in some ways, Hannah and Tom can draw comfort from the fact that he would have seen his ownership as just a chapter in a piece’s story. It is a deeply personal collection – the conkers, the curiosities that fill a cabinet in the drawing room and the mirror he bought in the last few months of his life are all his for a reason, for different reasons. Hannah never talked with her father about what would happen when he was no longer around, but she is consoled by the fact that ‘he would have loved it – a great big, fantastic auction sale’.
‘Robert Kime: The Personal Collection’ will take place at Dreweatts, Donnington Priory, near Newbury, on October 4-6: dreweatts.com.
On September 11, Hatta Byng will be joined by interior designer Nina Campbell and Will Fisher, of Jamb at the V&A South Kensington, to discuss the legacy left by Robert Kime, and the extraordinary reach of his sophisticated and comfortable aesthetic. With a focus on Robert's collection and the upcoming Dreweatts sale, the panel will explore what these most precious of objects meant to Robert, and, in a broader sense, what they mean to the world of design. Tickets to the talk cost from £15. For more info visit vam.ac.uk .
