Robert Kime, uniquely among decorators, has risen to
eminence in the profession via antique dealing, textile collecting and an
abiding passion for putting rooms together. His three strands of expertise run
side by side as he creates decorating schemes for an illustrious, discreet and
world-wide clientele.
HIS CLIENTS HAVE INCLUDED THE PRINCE OF WALES AND THE DUKE
OF BEAUFORT. HIS INTERIORS APPEAR TO HAVE EVOLVED OVER TIME, COMBINING A
RELAXED MOOD WITH ANTIQUES, VINTAGE TEXTILES AND QUIRKY PIECES.
With an unparalleled reputation as a discreet, tasteful
interior designer, Robert Kime has worked on grand houses internationally.
The current Robert Kime fabric range is acknowledged to be
the UK's most inspired, varied and beautiful, by the public and his peers
alike. Visit the collection, and see how some of the materials have been used
in rooms designed by Robert Kime himself.
Prince Charles's designer is decorated
By Caroline Davies12:01AM GMT 31 Dec 2003
The interior decorator and fabric designer Robert Kime, 58,
pictured, who redecorated Clarence House and Highgrove for the Prince of Wales
becomes an LVO (Lieutenant of the Royal Victorian Order) for interior design
services.
He joins Colleen Harris, 48, the Prince's former press
secretary, on the list of those personally honoured by the Queen. Mrs Harris,
awarded the MVO, (Member of the Royal Victorian Order) recently left the Prince
to join the Commission for Racial Equality.
The Royal Victorian Order is a reward for personal service
to the Sovereign and her family and is seen as a mark of royal esteem. It is
bestowed not on the recommendation of the Prime Minister, but is in the Queen's
gift.
ROBERT KIME
The book features twelve definitive Robert Kime projects,
ranging from Bloomsbury to the Bahamas, from the Irish countryside to la France
profonde. Magnificent, specially-commissioned photography by Tessa Traeger is
accompanied by a text which combines illuminating descriptions of the choices
and challenges involved in each project with an account of how this most
cultured of designers developed his eye.
Style File: Robert Kime
The enduring influence of Robert Kime cannot be denied. His
schemes - often an elaborate mix of antique treasures and his own colourful
textiles - attest to a life spent honing an academic approach to pattern, and
have graced some of the world's best houses. Tastemaker and antiques dealer
Christopher Gibbs muses on the essence of Robert Kime's interiors and his
unique contribution to English decoration
TESSA TRAEGER
BY CHRISTOPHER GIBBS
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.
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.
At home with Camilla and Charles: Inside the Clarence House
revealed
THE public was given a rare glimpse inside Clarence House
this week when the Duchess of Cornwall met Princess Laurentien of the
Netherlands to discuss their shared interest in child literacy.
By DOMINIC MIDGLEY
PUBLISHED: 00:58, Fri, Oct 18, 2013
Camilla meets Princess Laurentien in the morning room at
Clarence House AP Camilla meets Princess Laurentien in the morning room at
Clarence House [AP]
Kime is designer to the gentry and king of discretion
The pictures that resulted from their photo call in the
morning room of the home that the Duchess and Prince Charles moved into 10
years ago show that the four-storey house has been restored in a way that is
calculated not to scare the horses.
Fans would describe the decor, conceived by interior designer
to the gentry Robert Kime, as an example of timeless English elegance.
Kime, who also redecorated the Prince's Gloucestershire home
Highgrove, has a traditional, understated style, according to one interiors
insider.
"He is the designer of choice for posh people who don't
want the result to look like they've had a designer involved," he says.
"Kime is also the king of discretion, which appeals to
people like Charles and aristocrats generally."
He certainly had a job on his hands when he took on the
challenge of restoring Clarence House to its former glory following the death
of the Queen Mother in 2002.
"The Queen Mother didn't like disruption of any kind,
particularly in her later years, with the result that the place was falling to
bits," says the source.
Workmen had to rip out asbestos walls and ceilings and the
building was rewired at a cost of £4.5million drawn from a taxpayer-generated
fund earmarked for maintaining the palaces.
The Royal Household Property Services department carried out
the refurbishment and worked with organisations including the Forest
Stewardship Council to buy sustainable materials from "responsibly managed"
forests.
Charles then awarded Kime a budget of £1.6million from his
own resources to revamp decor and furniture.
Kime trawled through store rooms in search of appropriate
pieces and went to town on his trademark antique-style textiles.
Conscious of the furore at the revelation that Lord
Chancellor Derry Irvine had commissioned handmade wallpaper for his apartment
at a cost of £59,000 four years earlier the Prince's staff were at pains to
deny any extravagance and announced that bronze leaf had been used instead of
gold.
The result is a residence that combines the historic with
the homely.
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