At Home With: Master Plaster Caster, Peter Hone, Notting Hill

HOW WE ONLY CAME ACROSS the one-bedroom Notting Hill flat of antiques dealer and self-proclaimed Master Plaster Caster PETER HONE now, is quite a mystery, and a rather scandalous one at that! Browsing through our Instagram feed this weekend, we came across an image of the most magical place with a large round table and striped tablecloth, surrounded by plaster casts, and immediately needed to find out more about the space. The apartment sits inside a Georgian townhouse in Ladbroke Square in West London and is a virtual TREASURE trove of neoclassical marble busts, statues, urns, sculptures and architectural fragments, Roman and Greek statuettes and 19th-century Coade stone sculptures.

In early May of 2014, then shopkeepers Pentreath & Hall wrote about their experience visiting his flat for the first time, and the feeling of being overwhelmed with the thought that such a place as beautiful as this even exists, let along in a one-bedroom flat in London. The pair were there to ask if they might sell Hone’s architectural plaster casts in their shop, and to their delight, he was on board at once.

Peter Hone became an antiques collector by accident, walking down Camden Passage (a street in Islington, north London known for its antiques dealers), when he saw a sign in a shop window that said, ‘To Let £65-per-week’, and decided that setting up shop would be fun. He was only 19 at the time and working as a pastry chef. “I had lots of famous customers – the Rolling Stones, The Beatles, aristocrats and Dame Barbara Cartland, who would pull up in her pink Rolls-Royce.” (The Telegraph)

Although Hone has been collecting for nearly five decades, he always told himself that he’d get rid of everything when he turned 75, and on 26 October of last year, to mark his turning 75, Hone sold his collection at Christie’s South Kensington.

Scroll through for what could only have been the most enchanting and utterly charming home in Notting Hill …