PROFILE: DAVID ROCHE
The extensive private collection of the late antiques aficionado is on public display at his house museum
O WALK INTO SOMEONE’S HOME is to enter a world that speaks of who they are. Is it clean or cluttered? Colourful or pared back? Every part of a home tells a story. And no home tells more about its owner than that of the late collector David Roche. Inspired by the many house museums he visited, Roche established the David Roche Foundation in 1999 to preserve his own collection of some 3500 objects with the ultimate aim of converting his home, Fermoy House, into a museum on his death. The building, a 1900s Federation-style bungalow in North Adelaide, along with an adjoining, “stripped back” new structure by architect David Burton, was recently opened to the public. “David was flamboyant,” says antiques dealer and director of the museum, Martyn Cook. “He was not afraid of pattern or colour.” Cook had nurtured a 40-year friendship with Roche that was bolstered by their mutual passion for antiques and objets d’art. The focus of the collection is on European decorative arts pieces spanning a period from 1690–1960 — and includes clocks, textiles,
paintings, sideboards, English porcelain and ornaments. Here, the most simple English pottery shares a stage with the Queen of Romania’s Fabergé parasol handle. Each piece was carefully curated by Roche to fill a specific space, whether in the Chinoiserie-themed bedroom, with its bespoke de Gournay wallpaper; the military dining room; the formal yellow drawing room; or the Russian room decorated in the style of Empress Maria Feodorovna’s Pavlovsk Palace. Roche once said: “It took much persuasion for me to believe that my little collection was good enough to do more than give me pleasure.” But it seems it is. The museum’s architect cites the collection as being worth upwards of $80 million. “We’ve approached [the build] very much from the focus that this is an extraordinary collection for someone to amass in their lifetime,” says Burton. “And really the building is about responding to it in as calm and elegant a manner as possible, without overshadowing it.” Cook agrees: “It reflects David enormously. The decoration in the house certainly has shoulder pads. It’s got an aura of the past.”