Moving almost 50 years of a collector’s haul to a smaller flat in Cyprus has resulted in an incredible home. RODERIC PRATT has a look around
Moving house, even within the same locality, often involves either a set of ideas for new furniture to match new-found space or a radical clear-out of furniture to correspond to the size and proportions of the new dwelling.
The what-to-keep and what-to-throw debate may involve some sentimental gulps in the throat but it’s all part of the process of moving on – at least for most people. But one Cypriot collector faced with downscaling to return home after nearly half a century in London was determined to have bring it all with him.
Had someone previously mooted the idea of transporting the contents of a small but comprehensive personal museum from its generously proportioned North London home to a comparatively modest three-bedroom apartment in Nicosia, reaction would have been characterised by a range of incredulity. But not for former fashion designer Iacovos Georgiades.
“While in London, I used to see a lot of things, going from museum to museum – and there’s a vast amount of exhibitions to see in London; you’re urged to start collecting something,” he says. “Collecting is an art to begin with, and living in London for 45 years you could find a lot of things. The persuasion is there, and the quality.”
In his view, you don’t have to be an expert in any one field to get the best out of collecting, more a clear conception of what you are looking for and a ready eye. Therefore the collector’s theatre of operations extends way beyond the comfortable opulence of upmarket auction houses and exclusive stores.
“Late afternoon in Portabello (Road – London’s celebrated antique market) the man was packing his things up. I asked him how much is this Russian icon and he told me ten shillings, so how could I leave it?”
“I’m not a merchant. I don’t sell anything. I just buy them for my own pleasure,” he said. It’s a pleasure that visibly endures, albeit now without the choice available in London’s markets and antique shops.
“I think that the market in Cyprus is limited. There are not so many things to my liking here but sometimes I’m lucky – even with porcelain. I was in a second-hand shop by the green line and I found a Royal Dalton cup and saucer going for 20 cents! Yes, it’s in there,” he said, gesturing toward one of many elegant display cabinets.
Georgiades is the quintessential collectors’ collector – a man with an enduring passion for surrounding himself with tastefully assembled treasures even if his down-sized home now ends up resembling Aladdin’s cave.
Organising, cataloguing and arranging the fruits of several decades of unrestrained collecting represented a logistical challenge when Georgiades moved house. Selling-up, storage or arrangements with a public museum would have presented themselves as more reasonable options than bringing it all with him.
The project could not have been contemplated, less executed, without a designer’s flare for arrangement and geometry. And, to the delight of the visitor, it comes off. It really works.
Far from being an over-imposing, heavy-laden dour and dark home crammed full of ill-blending pieces suffocating for lack of light and breathing space, the result is the reverse.
Bathed in light levels to order, compartmentalised to focus on selected areas at any given time, the whole is resplendent, awash with colour and an array of different artistic enterprises, gaining rather than losing from their close proximity to each other.
Barely an inch separates the pieces of artwork covering the walls, leaving the impression that each were commissioned as much for their proportions as for their content.
Prominent among the pieces is an impressive collection of old maps and books dating from the 16th century. These present a four-hundred-year anthology of the history of Cyprus, with many of the books resulting from the observations of travellers passing through the island during its occupation on their way to the Holy Land, thereby documenting an otherwise little-chronicled period of the island’s history.
“What they have left behind is the story of this place – because for 400 years Cyprus was in darkness,” says Georgiades. “It’s only after the British came to Cyprus that we managed to print a few books about the history of Cyprus and recollect the travellers who came to Cyprus during those dark years.”
The collection includes books from around the start of the British administration here in 1878, and one rather amusingly presented guide to “our new colony,” from shortly afterwards. The historical content is further enhanced by original newspaper cuttings, referring to, among other events, Russian harassment of Ottoman naval operations around Cyprus and a history of the Ottoman take-over of the island written in old French.
In impeccably ordered folders and drawers around the home are hints of the early days of collection fever – advertising posters and cinema flyers from days gone by, recalling stars such as Errol Flynn, Margaret Lockwood, Clark Gable and Shirley Temple. That sometime child star has a special place in the collector’s collection of memories. He graduated to garnering stamps with her picture from packets of sweets, having first embarked, as so many of that generation, with a young boy’s more general interest in philately.
The many paintings gracing the walls include a signed original by David Hockney, and a selection of works by Greek artists, while sharing the space is a selection of religious icons, including that bargain picked up in London’s Portabello Road and one of special personal significance belonging, as it did, to his late mother.
Showcase displays include a collection of 450 finely-crafted eggs freezing tiny objects in suspended animation such as a fly caught many centuries back by natural tree glue. That and a selection of fossils have then been surrounded by a semi-precious stone mould.
The interest in stone eggs dates back to window-gazing outside Aspreys in London one Easter, which seemed a logical extension of the fashion designer’s use of stones in embroidery, while it in turn prompted another collection interest – that of snuff bottles.
In the same room stands earthenware dating back to the early bronze age (around 2,000 BC) alongside a collection of more recent handywork, such as that Royal Dalton cup and saucer, and a rang of silverware including cigarette lighters and boxes, sewing thimbles (in a nod to the collector’s profession) and, with perhaps unintended poignancy – a miniature Aladdin’s Lamp.
