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“He told me that it was on the market, I had to buy it and that I must view it that very day, and he'd gone there and removed the For Sale sign.” Phillip made an offer the same day. “I'd no sooner moved there when I got a phone call from one of my previous neighbours, who told me about this house that had come on the market.” The house was about half as large again as his first house in Spitalfields, and had been occupied by the offices of a company that was folding in the wake of the financial crash. Ironically, it was shortly after he had moved back to Greenwich again in 2010 that a friend called him excitedly about a four-storey house that was for sale – once again, on Elder Street. “It’s a miracle that the street even survives.” Like many in the area, the 18th-century townhouse had been condemned before being saved by squatters from the Spitalfields Trust nonetheless, this hadn’t stopped the authorities from demolishing the top two floors while people were living in the building. “I moved through a succession of Georgian houses,” he explains, “renovating them and furnishing them.” After a spell living in Greenwich, he moved into a house on E1’s Elder Street. The dream of owning a country house never quite faded, but when Phillip learned about the 18th-century merchants’ townhouses in Spitalfields, many of which had been left derelict or neglected as the East End fell ever further down-at-heel throughout the 20th century, he amended his plans.
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And so when everybody else was having a good time on Saturday night, I was loading my van up, and going to the fair.” “I was studying law, but at the same time, stalling out at the Charnock Richard fair. “I ended up falling in with a crowd of antique dealers in Winchester, when I should have been at sixth form college.” In university, a blue brush-painted Sherpa van freed him to travel around the country for fairs. A dreadful thing, but I used to read it.” Paper round money let Phillip begin collecting, and he soon found himself browsing the antiques fairs at Newark and Ardingly.
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1 Royal Crescent, I thought was stunning.” He bought a postcard, which he still has today, and by 15 or so, he had decided – “rather implausibly” – that he would make it his life’s aim to own an English country house.Īround the same time, he was taken around an antiques fair by his mother, where he bought his first Georgian piece, and he started a paper round, which included “delivering a Marshall Cavendish publication called Times Past.
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“I found the caves to be extremely boring, but No. 1 Royal Crescent and also Wookey Hole Caves,” says Phillip. In the shadow of the bright steel skyscrapers dotted around Liverpool Street station, stepping into the quiet of Spitalfields House is like entering the abode of someone living during the reign of George III or IV – which, when he’s at home, Phillip does, in a sense.Ī barrister by profession, Phillip decided to become a lawyer at the age of five (“I decided that, and I could not be deflected”), but it was an encounter with Regency-era Bath as a young teenager that imbued him with a fascination for the 18th and early 19th centuries that remain with him today. Those tripod tables and Chinese vases – and many, many other beguiling objects besides – are all the more covetable for being presented against the backdrop of a meticulously restored Georgian townhouse in Spitalfields, in East London, which Phillip has spent more than a decade working to breathe life back into after years of neglect. But I can’t justify buying six tripod tables and 20 Chinese vases, and so I’m trying to justify doing it.” “The only reason why I’ve launched the website,” says Phillip Lucas of his nascent antique dealership Spitalfields House, “is because I love the objects so much and I want to keep finding them.