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Inside the maximalist south London house of a lifelong antiques collector
In the age of Marie Kondo and social media, our homes have become yet another marker of our homogeneous good taste.
Even the new maximalists tend to be at the mercy of the Insta hegemony of trinket trends. Enough followers and your off-beat vintage find will be the source of a thousand cheap knock-offs within days of posting.
So a home that genuinely shows off its owner’s personal taste is a refreshing rarity, especially in expensive London where adding character to a house is akin to cutting your share certificates into paper doilies.
A treasure trove of intriguing objects
“My interests are from another era. There aren’t many people of my age collecting the way I do,” says Daniel Gallen, 47, whose three-bedroom house in Stockwell is crammed floor-to-ceiling with intriguing objects. “Most people I know with great collections are in their 70s or 80s.”
Gallen attributes this in part to the capital’s property market, which has put space at a premium and added weight to the maxim that a home should be as neutral and anonymous as possible if you want to sell.
“All my friends who come round are amazed by my house but they wouldn’t necessarily want to live here,” he says. “People always say I could charge admission to my house but to make a living out of it I’d have to have a lot of people through the door every day.”
The house is testament to a lifetime of antiquing. “I’ve been collecting since I was six years old,” says Gallen.
“I was an only child and spent my primary school years in New York. Every weekend my parents would take me antiquing in New England; it was engrained in me from the start. I have Polaroids from then with my first antiques corner.”
Those early finds included old adverts as well as a biscuit tin collection, then as a teenager Gallen’s passion for collecting turned towards more traditional items such as stamps and postcards.
As an adult working initially in the art nouveau and art deco department of a major London auction house, Gallen first got into the folk art that forms the bulk of his collection today.
Focus on folk art
The latest piece in the house is an orange soda sign in the kitchen from 1950 but there are pieces dating back to 1750 — including hand-painted furniture, Georgian silhouettes, antique patchwork quilts and hooked rugs, puppets and antique toys — mostly from England, France, Germany and the United States.
“Wherever I go I’m always looking for antique shopping, whether I’m in Athens, Brussels or New York. I’m not the sort of person who could go and sit on the beach for two weeks, I’ve got to be looking for new, interesting things,” says Gallen.
Many of the pieces are sourced more locally, at Portobello Road, Alfies Antique Market, Vincent Square Antiques Market and at specialist shops — although Gallen bemoans the diminishing number of stores selling such wares. “I’m trying to create an overall look in my home that is interesting and unusual,” he says.
“If I could have the absolute best of everything I probably wouldn’t have so many things but if you’ve got a limited budget it’s better to bunch it up and go for quantity.”
“I see something I love then I find a home for it in the house, never the other way round, I don’t try to fill a spot with an item. I haven’t always had as much space as I wanted but I’ve always managed to fill the space I had from my teenage bedroom to my first flat in Crystal Palace.”
Decorating to complement antiques
Gallen moved to the Victorian end-of-terrace house after a divorce 12 years ago, decorating with unusual paint colours from Little Greene and Farrow & Ball to complement the collection.
Now he’s packing up and moving back to Ireland to care for his mother, an artist with her own impressive antique collection. “We have a much larger house in Dublin so I’ll be taking almost everything home with me.”
The house is on the market with Hamptons for £1.25 million and has had some interest from sympathetic buyers. “I don’t think my house is going to be for everyone, people don’t always like a lot of volume of objects nowadays — I’d never use the word clutter — but everyone who’s seen it has been impressed.
“It’s not a modernist, clean type of house. It’d be a full-time job for a cleaner to clean. I have to confess it’s hard to keep on top of it. I’m very careful in the kitchen and the bathrooms but, as Quentin Crisp once said, after four years the dust doesn’t get any worse.
“Sometimes it can be challenging to live in a house like a museum, but it’s a challenge I’m always up for.”
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