From the archive: Christopher Gibbs on Robert Kime

I first came to Robert many years ago to see his wares. He and his gifted wife Helen, an author of children's books who died in 2012, were living and dealing in antiques from a gothic school­house at Mildenhall, or 'Mynll' in Wiltshire-speak. I was immediately seduced by the quality, the diversity and the idiosyncratic poetry of what was on offer.

Over long years, we bought and sold together. The sales of great country houses were always a meeting place, both of us racing around and often marking the same handful of enviable objects. Robert is perhaps fractionally more acquisitive than me. 'I think that has to be a keepie,' he would say firmly, as he tumbled a cascade of Regency chintzes or revealed a fragment of antiquity in the stable yard unremarked by the cataloguer. Like an older master, the hard-to-forget Geoffrey Bennison, Robert came to decorating from dealing. 'I want a home like yours,' the good client would plead.

Robert has carefully restored a great variety of houses over the years: there is the refreshment of the Duke of Beaufort's Swangrove, the West Indian Paradise Island for Mrs Gilbert Lloyd, and the rich and wondrous res­urrection of South Wraxall Manor for John and Gela Taylor.

With a growing family and a flourishing business, the Kimes moved, first to a long, low house west of Marlborough, where sarsens litter the landscape. The hub of Robert's own homes is always the kitchen; he is a good cook - as was Helen - and their son Tom is now a noted chef. Good cooking is assisted by good gardening and equal attention given to the perfect ordering of life outside. In Robert's hands, the productive garden, also home to rare and fragrant plant treasures, is woven in to the wider landscape and - like the rooms inside - is strewn with treasures culled over decades, touchstones and talis­men, which contribute to the happy feeling of continuity and ageless and gentle harmony.

MAY WE SUGGEST: Robert Kime's intricately-layered flat is the distillation of 50 years of expertise

Later, when the antiques business burgeoned and calls came to transform the houses of friends and clients, they moved east to Fosbury in Wiltshire, to Upper Farm, set on a windy down up a steep and ancient track, remote and amply supplied with barns and outbuildings. These were soon filled with the fruits of Robert's forays to sales and on jaunts into the Maghreb and the Levant.

The beautiful and surprising always lurk in the Kime labyrinth: the rare, the charming, battered beauties, all ingredients that might make rooms dance and smile. Textiles, often copied from antique fragments and docu­ments and made anew in Anatolian villages, or by the handful of English craftsmen able to work to Robert's standards, and a team of well-tutored acolytes, made possible a flow of unfamiliar, always lovely materials, destined for a London market.

So what is the spring of this ceaseless creativity? All flows from a deep knowledge of architecture, the decorative arts and the natural world, but also from a subtle sense of place - the genius loci, as our forefathers called it. A house must be made fit for life today, for the family that lives there. It must breathe afresh. Light must be caught and brought within. Floors must be strewn with oriental carpets and rugs, chosen with unerr­ing skill, and include indoor gardens. Outside, the true garden must be joined to the house and wider landscape, and seem, by careful planting, to have been there forever. Treasures from outside must come in, like the drooping yellow Tulipa sylvestris in an Iznik jug.

Robert's flat above his Museum Street shop, is the culmination of a lifetime's creativity, which apes the pyramid of Halicarnassus. A dazzling distillation of his lifetime as a collector; pared, pruned, sprinkled with treasures we've seen over the years, spilling over with books, fragrant with wafting flowers from his terrace, modest, welcoming, generous.

Robert Kime is a member of The List by House & Garden, our essential directory of design professionals. Find his profile here.

robertkime.com