The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
From the ruins
How an antiques dealer made a derelict east London building liveable
This is the softest, soft est stone…’ says Will Fisher, tenderly contemplating an 18thcentury fireplace in his home in Spitalfields, east London. Fisher is one of Britain’s most respected antique dealers. He has revived interest in country-house furniture, isolating pieces from their swagged-curtain surroundings and displaying them in spare, pared-down settings, so each object appears almost sculptural. Yet the story of how he – and the fireplace – arrived in the capital has a few zigzags along the way.
Fifteen years ago, Fisher thought he was buying a house in Spitalfields. By some sleight of hand, it was sold to another buyer. He raged, he vowed to find another house, he searched obsessively, but it proved difficult. Near the Hawksmoor-designed Christ Church, prices rocketed in the smart 18 th-century streets that were rapidly being colonised by bankers, bankable artists and film stars (there’s even a Chanel beauty boutique in Spitalfields market). But a few streets of tyre replacement yards, Balti restaurants and clothing wholesalers remained, and it was in one of these that, three years ago, Fisher found a house that nobody else would touch.
‘It’s a late 19th-century commercial building and it was in a bad way,’ he recalls. ‘My lawyer said, “You’re mad. Don’t buy this building.” The squatters in it worked for a music magazine and the whole building stank of dope.’ When he and his wife, Charlotte Freemantle, went into a room filled with sleeping bags and reeking piles of clothes, one of the piles began moving – someone was sleeping beneath it.
Unperturbed, Fisher came to a gentleman’s agreement with the squatters and bought the
‘My lawyer said, “You’re mad. Don’t buy this building.” The squatters in it worked for a music magazine and the whole building stank of dope’
building. Fortunately, they were true to their word and left.
‘I really, really, really fell for the place – it was love,’ he declares. ‘It was unmortgageable and I didn’t get a survey. I kind of knew it was destroyed. The worse it was, the more exciting it became. Charlotte was slightly exhausted at the prospect but supportive. My builder Robert Hilton is great and he cared about the building as much as I did. Charlotte calls him “Mills” – short for Camilla, as in Charles and Diana and [the Princess of Wales], ‘‘There are three people in this marriage.”’
Hilton had a great deal of work to do. The front façade, which had become detached from the main structure, had to be pinned back. The ground-floor shop, which came as part of the deal, was restored and is now a chic book store. A kitchen has been added at the back of the first floor and an extra storey built on the building ’s flat roof, housing a living room and terrace with great views of the City of London. The terrace is surrounded by a handsome art deco balustrade that once graced Somerset House. ‘I went out to lunch one day,’ Fisher says, ‘and by chance found it in a reclamation yard.’
But nothing really happens by chance in his world. Unusually for a boy from the gritty borough of Lewisham in south London, he has been training his eye for antiques since the age of nine. He was already mad about country houses, but his first collection was of Box Brownie cameras, which he ‘bought
‘I really, really, really fell for the place – it was love. I kind of knew it was destroyed. The worse it was, the more exciting it became’
The house nods to the Georgian traditions of the Spitalfields area, but Fisher felt no need to be a purist with the furnishings
for a quid a throw, in charity shops’ and sold at Christie’s for a tidy profit when he was 13.
His mentor was the legendar y collector Warner Dailey, whose stepson Sa m was Fisher’s best school friend and fellow trainee antiques runner. During school holidays, the boys toured London in Dailey’s Peugeot, helping him deliver to antique shops.
With a start like that, it’s no surprise that Fisher went on to found two successful businesses: Hawker Antiques, and his fireplace and reproduction shop Jamb, which are on the itineraries of collectors and interior designers from all over the world.
In 2012, needing to move premises, and having lost his storage warehouse, Fisher decided to sell all his stock – once again at Christie’s. It was a massive gamble, but t he sa le was a sensat ion, making nearly £4 million, and validating Fisher’s judgement, schola rship a nd t aste. ‘It was in t he few moments of peace and tranquillity after the sale that I found this house,’ he recalls.
The superbly finished panelling and joinery throughout the house nod to the Georgian traditions of the Spitalfields area, as do the elegant sofas, but Fisher felt no need to be a
purist with the furnishings. There’s an industrial kitchen with pewter cupboard doors, and a copy of an 1810 dining table beneath art deco beaten-copper hanging lamps, now recreated for his Jamb collection.
‘The excitement of hanging them there was just too much,’ says Fisher. ‘The light they give is superb: so warm and soft. And inside the panels there are pieces of glass, cut so that they throw out the light’.
This is typical Fisher on a piece he loves – and love is the right word. There are no compromises in his world. jamb.co.uk; hawkerantiques.com