Christopher Gibbs
Style guru who taught the rock stars and aristocrats of Swinging London how to live ‘beautiful lives’
CHRISTOPHER GIBBS, who has died aged 79, was an antiques dealer, interior designer, bibliophile and aesthete who pioneered a style of interior decoration often described as “distressed bohemian” – a mixture of refinement, exoticism and well-worn grandeur.
A typical Gibbs interior might comprise a carefully chosen assemblage of fine Georgian furniture, threadbare sofas, Chinese blue-andwhite ceramics, antique objets, church hangings, carpets from the Maghreb and vibrantly clashing cushions and drapes. It was a look that took years of antiquarian scholarship, poring through the sales catalogues of auction houses, and eye-watering prices to achieve. But Gibbs insisted that his aim was “to help people make nice, cosy homes where they are going to live happy, beautiful lives” – adding, “No, it’s not tongue-in-cheek. I mean it.”
A quietly spoken man of considerable erudition and great personal warmth, Gibbs became the arbiter of taste for a wealthy clientele that ran the gamut from rock stars to aristocrats, and which reflected his own extensive social circle. If conversation with Gibbs could sometimes seem like a Himalayan expedition in name dropping – be it mention of a famous pop-star, aristocrat, or an “amusing German prince” (the banker Rupert Lowenstein, whom Gibbs introduced to Mick Jagger, and who became the Rolling Stones’ business manager), it was because Gibbs did indeed seem to know everyone.
In 1967 he was among the houseparty at the infamous bust at Keith Richards’s Sussex home, which resulted in the arrest of Mick Jagger and the art dealer Robert Fraser for possession of drugs. In the 1980s, he was largely responsible for rousing his friend John Paul Getty Jr from the torpor in which Getty lay in the London Clinic, being treated for drug addiction and depression, and persuading him to make a donation of £40million to the National Gallery. In 2012 Gibbs advised and sourced much of the furnishing for the restoration of Spencer House by his friend Jacob, Lord Rothschild.
Christopher Gibbs was born on July 29 1938, the fifth son of Sir Geoffrey Cokayne Gibbs KCMG and his wife Helen. Following in his father’s footsteps, Gibbs was sent to be educated at Eton, but was expelled, as he would later recall, “for drinking, panty raids on other boys’ rooms, that sort of thing…” After attending the University of Poitiers, and a short spell in the Army, he became the hub of “the Chelsea Set” – a loose aggregate of young aristos, public schoolboys and the more racy species of debutantes, who frequented the Markham Arms in Chelsea, and whose principal enthusiasms were clothes, inebriation and a rather self-conscious slumming.
Gibbs was the dandy par excellence; as a 14-year-old at Eton he had sported velvet slippers, a monocle and a silver-topped cane with blue tassels and handed out visiting cards. He was said to be the first person on the King’s Road to wear flared trousers, in 1961, and the first to wear kaftans. “He was very flash,” Nik Cohn wrote in his book on British style in the Sixties, Today
There Are No Gentlemen. “Sometimes he just wore tight jeans or fancy dress, like the others; but mostly his tastes were elaborate; suits with doublebreasted waistcoats and cloth-covered buttons, and velvet ties, and striped Turkish shirts with stiff white collars, and cravats. Above all, he had a passion for carnations and was forever buying new strains, pink-and-yellow, or green-ink, or purple with red flecks.”
In 1958 Gibbs made his first visit to Tangier, returning with a stock of drapes, hangings and cushions, with which he stocked his first antiques shop in Chelsea, selling decorative objets and furniture. Fascinated, as he put it, “by the mixture of the grand and the raffish and the fast and the chic”, Gibbs became the aesthetic centre of a group that embodied the socially fluid and hedonistic mood of Sixties London.
The set included the Rolling Stones (it was said to be Gibbs who “initiated Mick Jagger into the arcane mysteries of high camp”), the heir to the Guinness fortune Tara Browne, the men’s fashion designer Michael Fish and the American avant-garde film director, occultist and Aleister Crowley enthusiast Kenneth Anger (“He’d hate me to say it,” Gibbs once remarked, “but Kenneth’s a cosy old thing.”). Robert Fraser would credit Gibbs as having invented “Swinging London”.
Gibbs’s Cheyne Walk home became a salon for the hip elite. It was used by director Michelangelo Antonioni as the set for the party scene in Blow-up, and Anger also used Gibbs’s home to shoot some of the scenes of his infamous masterpiece Lucifer Rising.
In 1968 Gibbs was employed to design the interiors for Donald Cammell and Nic Roeg’s seminal Sixties film Performance, about a past-it rock star, Turner, played by Mick Jagger. Cammell had stipulated that the interiors should be decorated “predominantly in the Gibbsian Moroccan manner, furnished with strange and beautiful things”, suffused with a glamorous decay, “the dust in its crannies of a refined sensibility”. It was the style that Cammell had employed in designing Brian Jones’s flat in Earls Court.
Gibbs furnished Turner’s rooms with mats and hangings from Morocco, a bedspread from the Hindu Kush, a marbled bath with 17th century Japanese dishes, and tiles designed from a Persian carpet. “I wanted something mysterious and beautiful and unexpected, exotic and voluptuous and far away from pedestrian; some hint of earthly paradise. It also had to be done in four and half minutes on four and a half pennies.”
An enthusiastic consumer of marijuana and LSD, Gibbs nonetheless retained a tenacious work ethic. “I definitely suffer from the blown-mind syndrome,” he told the writer Paul Gorman, recalling the Sixties. “The only thing I’ll say in my favour is that I was practically the only person I knew who actually went to work at nine o’clock in the morning … because I had a job, my own business, and I realised that, if I didn’t, I wouldn’t have any of those things.”
For years Gibbs occupied a set in Albany, the most exclusive address in London, where his friend the writer Bruce Chatwin once lived in the attic “with a Jacob chair from the Tuileries and the 18th-century bedsheets of the King of Tonga adorning the wall”.
In 1972 he bought a former Benedictine nunnery, Davington Priory in Faversham, where for three years his houseguest was the mercurial David Litvinoff, an intimate of Lucian Freud, the Kray Brothers and the Rolling Stones, who acted as “director of authenticity” on Performance.
Litvinoff became so intolerable that Gibbs was finally obliged to move out. Shortly afterwards, Litvinoff killed himself there with an overdose of sleeping pills. “He left me a note, which I found three months later, hidden in some shirts,” Gibbs recalled. “He loved blues music. It said ‘I’ve made eight tapes for you in such and such a box; please send another tape marked X to somebody in Australia’. No question of ‘I’m terribly sorry to have been such a nuisance’ or anything like that.”
Gibbs later sold the house to Bob Geldof, who planned Live Aid there.
In 1980, following his mother’s death, Gibbs took over his childhood home, the manor house at Clifton Hampden in Oxfordshire, which had been built for his family in the 1840s. He sold the house in 2000, moving to a small cottage on the estate. An auction of the house’s contents in 2000, which raised £3million, included a dining table cut from a slice of wood, thought to be one of the first pieces of mahogany transported to England from the New World by Charles II’S navy in the 17th century, and an embroidered Elizabethan purse that belonged to the first Lord Yarmouth, treasurer to James II, containing a fragment of the monarch’s blue silk garter enclosed in a wisp of paper bearing the words, “King James’s Garter – I touch and God cures’’.
Gibbs was a connoisseur of English church architecture, the decorative arts, antiquarian books and the gardens of stately homes. His friend John Richardson, Picasso’s biographer, described him as being “in the tradition of English cognoscenti – like an 18th-century English parson who knew more about Etruscan vases than anybody in the British Museum.” He disdained bad manners, kitsch, the “floridity” of the super-rich, and television sets.
In 2006 he auctioned off the last of his stock at Christie’s and retreated to Tangiers, where he bought a home overlooking the city. This he furnished with characteristically eclectic taste with such items as a mid-17th-century painting attributed to Luca Giordano, shabby sofas, antique marbled tables and a collection of whips. While admitting that he sometimes got “homesick for snowdrops”, Gibbs admired Tangiers as a place, he once said, where you could feel “the ancient world still kicking along”, and where his aesthetic sense was tempered by “the basics … Here they can cheer things up with a bunch of flowers or a small piece of needlework.”
There he concentrated on cultivating his garden, and his duties as a church warden at the city’s Anglican church, St Andrew’s. A visitor to Gibbs’s home noted that “he was wearing wonderful kaftans, and he looked like Moses walking in the olive garden.”
He never married.
Christopher Gibbs, born July 29 1938, died July 28 2018