Dealer’s Choice

Ken Bolan has spent his career gambling on decorating trends – then waiting for the world to catch up. Dinah Hall visits his Somerset house to see what he’s betting on being big next.

Just as ‘shop’ is an inadequate word to describe Ken Bolan’s antiques emporium, Talisman which sits like a behemoth at the end of the New King’s Road in London, so you would hesitate to call his Somerset home a cottage – although that is indeed what it’s called. Approached from the lane, it looks small and quaint and fairly unremarkable, but it has long outgrown its modest beginnings. Stepping inside, you enter a dimly lit grey-green paneled hall – just about all that is left of the house Bolan and his Swiss wife, Yolande, bought 20 years ago. They have laid a 17th-century Swedish-marble floor. ‘See two crosses in that stone?’ says Bolan. ‘It came from a monastic property and once a week when they washed the floor they would score chalk crosses to stop evil entering. It must have taken hundreds of years for the stone to be worn away.’ Open a door from this dark hall, with its collections of walking sticks and crystal prisms, and you burst into a huge, light room open to the rafters, which has the feel of a Vermont hunting lodge, albeit one filled with Roman busts, Danish painted cupboards, Burmese temple vases and Argentine glass lampshades.

Bolan says that the house has developed ad hoc. ‘We’ve just built bits on as we’ve needed them.’ Add to that the dizzying mix of furniture and antiques, from second-century marble busts to 1970’s Lucite tables, and you begin to get an idea of what it must be like inside Bolan’s head. ‘It’s just what I do at Talisman. Some people come in and freeze because it’s too much for them – there’s no one direction. But that’s how I feel inside and I’m very comfortable with it. Why go down just one avenue when there’s so much to explore and enjoy?’ And when you put together his shop, house and garden it does begin to make sense. Bolan is an empire-builder, annexing space to his house his constantly growing interests. And he has a passion for the monumental and the exotic – qualities on view at his current garden exhibition in the forecourt of Talisman.

When he started in the business 35 years ago it was, he says, all about collectors, whereas now it’s more fashion-led. ‘Oh, God, the houses were dull’, he says, ‘They’d do an all-Adam house. Where’s the imagination in that?’ Although he has seen fashions come and go, he is adamant that ‘middle-class, boring brown furniture will never ever come back. I can’t see anyone wanting to buy a full mahogany bureau with dull interior and even duller outside.’

Bolan has always been ahead of the game, spotting the potential in Swedish painted furniture 25 years ago and Lucite in the 1990’s. Inevitably this involves gambling on style and means that it may be some time before other people share his taste. ‘I don’t normally get it wrong,’ he says. The big thing now is 20th-century vintage, but he is targeting a niche: European designers who lived in America from the 1930s to the 1970s. In his airy ‘Swedish’ room, sunlight sparkles off a collection of fused glass by Michael Higgins, a British designer who went to Chicago in the 1930s. Like chunky Murano geode bowls, you might have sneered at on your mother-in-law’s sideboard 20 years ago, but now…well, you’d sell your mother-in-law to get it. Bolan admits that it was Yolande who opened his eyes to it and that this is her collection – though for how long is debatable. But then she is used to the vagaries of living with a dealer. During the 1990s recession they had to sell practically everything they owned. So when he gave her the 1920 Zadounaisky cut-steel wall plaque of a shark for her birthday it was on the proviso that ‘If we’re broke, we’ll need to sell it.’

Bolan claims, perhaps as a defence measure, that you should never ‘become possessed by your possessions’. Yolande and his daughter Morgane listen intently and slightly warily when he considers what he would not sell: the 18th-century painted cupboard bought ten years ago, because it gives him ‘immense pleasure’; the statue of a black panther ‘the children bought in Paris when they were young. Well, they didn’t know they bought it. What I mean is that they had money in the bank and we probably didn’t…’ Some of his favourite pieces just fall into his lap. Isabel Goldsmith walked into Talisman one day and offered him the tent interiors that line the spare bedroom’s walls. And it’s significant that he dwells on the story behind pieces – finds made in barns, meetings with ‘couriers’ in foreign cities like something out of a Frederick Forsyth novel. It’s clearly the chase that excites him. But, when asked what he most likes of all his possessions, he doesn’t hesitate and points to a cream spiky pot in and hall and we see a chink in his dealer’s armour. It was made by his son Seb five years ago.