“I rather like the idea of a whole new phase of life, with fewer possessions,” Christopher Gibbs said, somewhat unconvincingly. Gibbs, 62, was gazing wistfully at the handsome stone exterior of the Manor House at Clifton Hampden, a rambling three-story house in Oxfordshire built for his family in the 1840s that he reluctantly sold in July.
An inveterate collector, antiques dealer, bibliophile and provenance fetishist, Gibbs plainly has mixed emotions about bidding adieu to the house and most of its contents, which Christie’s auctioned off recently in 802 lots in a vast tent on the lawn.
It brought in a total of $4.6 million, with many items going for twice or more what the auction house had estimated. “I wish I could stay here forever,” Gibbs admitted. “But it’s quite a caper to keep a place like this going.”
A connoisseur of the weird and wonderful–among the items for sale was a Victorian stuffed two-headed lamb (it sold for $1,458)–Gibbs is something of a legend in British and international circles as a style guru and playmate to everyone from John Paul Getty Jr. to Bob Geldof and Mick Jagger, whose various mansions he has stocked with treasures.
He also is a leading proponent of that elusive brand of antidecoration, high-Bohemian taste favored by self-confident Englishmen, a look based on well-worn grandeur, disarming charm and unexpected contrasts. The magic is in the mix of masterpieces and oddities–such as an assemblage of refined and wild-card house guests who mysteriously combine to create the ideal convivial country-house weekend. The allergy here is to the banal, not to dust.
“It’s an aesthetic that emanates from great culture and personal passions–not from merely traipsing around the D&D Building,” said Peter Dunham, a Los Angeles-based interior designer who planned to trek from Beverly Hills for the sale.
. Dunham previously had seen the sale items only in the plump Christie’s catalog, though as a schoolboy he often visited Gibbs’ London store. “It was an education in an alphabet of style quite particular to Christopher Gibbs. `A’ for atmosphere. `B’ for beauty. `C’ for culture. And some would add `D’ for decayed and `E’ for expensive.”
In the last category might be the 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, which sold for $121,100. “Pepys would probably have sat at this table,” Gibbs said.
Where did that come from
He is besotted by objects that possess illustrious or peculiar histories. One object of desire is an embroidered Elizabethan purse that belonged to the first Lord Yarmouth, treasurer to James II, containing a talismanlike fragment of the monarch’s blue silk garter enclosed in a wisp of paper bearing the words “King James’ Garter–I touch and God cures.” It brought $65,189.
Quite mad
Although ostensibly of sound mind, Gibbs appears to dote on artworks that depict madness. “There are lots of freaky people here,” he noted, alighting on a series of framed pictures adorning the cluttered upstairs hall. One favorite is a 19th Century portrait (it sold for $4,288) of John Nichols Thom, a onetime Cornish wine merchant pictured in a dashing scarlet Maltese costume.
“He was a famous con man, a deluded person who went under many names,” Gibbs said. “He called himself Sir William Courtenay, Knight of Malta, the Earl of Devon and Count Moses Rothschild. It all got a little out of hand when he tried passing himself off as the King of Jerusalem and the Messiah.”
Nearby is a hand-colored lithograph of Dennis Collins, a 19th Century rogue charged with trying to kill William IV in Abingdon, a few miles down the road from here. “Every loony must go,” Gibbs said, pointing to a red Christie’s label attached to the frame. The lithograph sold for $2,230.
While he clearly will miss the manor house and its contents–along with the statuary-filled garden he has created along the Thames since inheriting the property in 1980–Gibbs is hardly homeless. He has four residences, including two houses in Morocco, a splendid pied-a-terre in historic Albany (the traditional London residence for those with grand country estates) and a thatched cottage he has rented in Clifton Hampden. For now, he has no intention of giving up his celebrated antiques shop in Dove Walk, just off Pimlico Road in London.
Still, the sentimental attachment to his ancestral home–where he went to live at 8–will be hard to shake, Gibbs said, noting that the 12th Century church next door holds the remains of numerous forebears. (He traces his aristocratic pedigree to the 16th Century, with various titled ancestors along the way who topped up the family fortunes by marrying heiresses.) But as a single man, he said, “there comes a moment in life that you feel rather absurd living in a great big house on your own.”
Until this summer, the only other habitual occupant was Louisa Wagland, his housekeeper of 25 years. Shelves in the kitchen hold photographs from the 90th-birthday party Gibbs gave in her honor in June, in a spectacular Moroccan tent he purchased for the occasion, with all her great-grandchildren and friends from the village. “She died two days later, which was very elegant,” he said.
A souvenir
In a meadow at the edge of garden, overlooking a gentle bend in the Thames, he recently erected a pinnacle from the roof of the College Chapel at Eton. “I thought I’d leave something behind,” he said of the architectural fragment, which sits on a pedestal engraved with a Latin inscription explaining that both the pinnacle and Gibbs himself were expelled from Eton. The pinnacle was timeworn and had to be replaced. But why was Gibbs obliged to leave?
“Various offenses,” he said cheerfully. “Illicit drinking, panty raids of other boys’ rooms–that sort of thing.”
Fittingly, the new monument was installed just days after Gibbs completed paperwork to sell the estate, an event he referred to as “signing the terrible deed.”
“It was just terribly surprising to me,” he recalled. “I thought lots of people would come and be instantly bewitched by the place. Instead, they asked, `Is there only one radiator in this room?”‘
(A Danish couple showed the appropriate enthusiasm and will take possession of the property after the Christie’s traveling circus of security guards, auctioneers and packing crates has departed.)
Like many aristocratic Englishmen reared mostly in shivering-cold private schools, Gibbs seems to find a desire for central heating faintly embarrassing. Objects that smack of newness or have a gaudy shine are similarly infra dig. An elegantly faded George II gilt wood girandole in the front hall ($8,577) clearly has not been regilded since the 18th Century–the way Gibbs likes it. Similarly, a tatty Victorian buttoned-leather chesterfield sofa ($10,293) beside a William IV red-painted mahogany library table has a faded patina that the catalog politely refers to as “distressed.”
The table brought $16,297–four times Christie’s hefty preauction estimate. Hardly surprising, since beaten-up treasures from Gibbs have never come cheap–a phenomenon he explained by insisting that he generally pays handsomely for things himself, and has to make a profit.
“I like things in their natural state–people especially,” he said with a chuckle. “As life goes by, that’s what I admire. Objects and people that are unmonkeyed with, that are themselves, not trying to be something else.”
