Robert Kime, antiques dealer and interior decorator by appointment to the Prince of Wales – obituary
Robert Kime, who has died aged 76, was fabric designer, antiques dealer and interior decorator by Royal Appointment to the Prince of Wales, for whom he oversaw the redecoration of Highgrove and Clarence House.
A rival was heard to complain that everything Kime did “looks like a vicarage”, but if so it did his reputation little harm. As well as the Prince of Wales, his clients included dukes and earls (he redesigned the Duke of Beaufort’s hunting lodge and turned the Duke of Northumberland’s Alnwick Castle from a chilly ancestral pile into a welcoming family home) and a long list of “people in the know”, including Lord Puttnam, Daphne Niarchos and the Lloyd Webbers.
Kime’s elegant, low-key designs drew from a magpie mix of cultural influences and exemplified the sort of understated, informal opulence beloved by those who feel they have nothing to prove.
He himself was very far from being the stereotypical “lifestyle” designer who leaves his own signature on the finished product. A man of great charm and diffidence, he regarded each house as “special” and always worked within the grain of history and family memories. Decoration, he said “is all about layers — of the memories and the history of the owners of the house”.
One of the keys to his success was his flair for choosing strongly-coloured and variously-textured textiles to set off a more muted background palette. “I use textiles to add a dash,” he explained. “They can lift a room from being thunderingly English and middle-class, and get some life into it.” When Nancy Reagan saw Kime’s transformation of the Lloyd Webbers’ duplex in the Trump Tower in New York, she said: “It’s madly clever. Nothing matches.”
Kime drew from sources as disparate as Walter Scott novels and Indian embroideries, and could often be found browsing antique markets in Italy and France as wells as souks from Istanbul and Damascus to Cairo. Legend has it that on one trip to Egypt he chanced upon a pile of linen cloths which he thought would be perfect for sheer curtains. Not knowing that they were shrouds, he asked if he could buy the lot, to which the salesman replied: “What? Are you planning a massacre?”
As well as working as an interior designer, Kime also traded in antiques and carefully-chosen eastern furniture, and sold his own range of high-quality (and very expensive) fabrics, based on traditional Indian, Turkish and Uzbek patterns, with colours skilfully adjusted to suit European tastes. “I do ethnic that doesn’t look ethnic, by mixing it up,” he explained.
But above all he paid careful attention to his clients’ needs. Before beginning a project he would often ask clients to go through their house naming every room and writing down 10 things they did in them, and his effects were often achieved as much by moving things round than buying new. This particularly applied to his work at Clarence House after the Prince of Wales moved in following the death of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother in 2002.
The house had not been touched since 1952 and was badly in need of a makeover. Carpets were fraying; wallpaper was stained and peeling and the wiring dangerous. The house was also filled with mementoes of its previous occupant.
Kime saw his task as “knitting the Prince of Wales in with his grandmother, and the house and the collection”, and much of his work involved rearranging what was already there. When one visitor saw the finished product he declared: “I don’t know what all the fuss is about – I mean, nothing’s changed.”
Kime took the remark as a compliment: “It feels as if the Queen Mother has just popped out,” he explained, “but all her history, treasures, and mementoes of her 100-year life are still there. You’re recreating something completely different, but with all these memories. We’re nothing without memory.”
Robert Kime was born on February 7 1946. His father was a fighter pilot, traumatised by the war, who left his mother when his son was one. Robert did not meet him again for 35 years, when he visited him briefly in Rhodesia: “I thought that if we were going to be great friends we would want to meet again, and if not, a weekend would be long enough. And it was, really.”
Kime’s mother remarried when he was three, and the family moved to Cheshire. He had a comfortable upbringing, surrounded by antique furniture that had belonged to his maternal grandmother. His dyslexia was so bad that he was never able to read his own handwriting, let alone anyone else’s; as a result he developed a strong visual memory for objects, which would stand him in good stead during his later career.
Despite this, Kime won a place to study Modern History at Worcester College, Oxford. In his first year, however, his mother’s second marriage broke down, and he left university for a year in order to sell the family home and move her to a more modest establishment. After returning to Oxford, to make ends meet he began dealing in antiques to dons and friends.
In his last term he met the botanist Miriam Rothschild at a party. Some time later she sent him a telegram, took him out to lunch, and told him that she had transferred a collection of antiques from her house to a shop in Oundle which she owned; she wanted him, she said, to “sell it all”. He agreed, on condition that she had the antiques independently valued. In the end, he ran the shop for three years, with a spell at Sotheby’s in the middle.
Robert Kime married, in 1970, Helen Nicoll, author of the Meg and Mog children’s books and founder of Cover-to-Cover, the audio cassette company. Although he specialised in decorating grand houses, Kime preferred more modest surroundings for himself and his family.
In Wiltshire, they lived in a former village hall with the original corrugated iron roof, albeit beautifully renovated with oak flooring, antique baths and a Bulthaup kitchen, as well as a vaulted-ceiling dining room, underfloor heating and a landscaped garden. In later life their home in London, a compact “one-and-a-half bedroom” 17th-century house in Bloomsbury, which doubled as a shop.
Robert Kime was appointed LVO in 2004.
His wife died in 2012 and he is survived by their son and daughter.
Robert Kime, born February 7 1946, died August 17 2022
