John Hobbs was a controversial and flamboyant antiques dealer whose Pimlico shop furnished American and continental decorators and collectors such as Gianni Versace and Hubert de Givenchy for over two decades until its closure after a spectacular falling out with his restorer-cabinetmaker.
In 2008 a Sunday Times investigation into claims by Dennis Buggins, a furniture restorer and pioneer of architectural salvage, prompted Sotheby’s to withdraw a pair of “antique” commodes catalogued as “German neoclassical, circa 1800” and estimated at up to £150,000, from auction in New York. The restorer produced a detailed worksheet showing that they had been built in his workshop in 1993 and 1994. John Hobbs was one of his principal clients, at times spending up to £10,000 a week with him, and the restorer further claimed that in 2007 another auction house had sold a “Georgian” mahogany desk with a Hobbs provenance which he had built using wood from a wardrobe.
Buggins, a master craftsman who had learnt his trade as a 14-year-old apprentice in Canterbury, went on to allege that he had created or substantially re-created many Hobbs antiques using wood from old but undistinguished pieces, church pews and planks from barns as well as completely new material. It was suggested that more than £30 million of “antiques” had been produced over a 20-year period, and suspicions were also voiced that stolen pieces had been cosmetically altered for resale. At one time Buggins employed at least 30 workmen at a farm near Chilham in Kent, and had other stores near by.
The dispute had originally arisen over unpaid bills, and its resolution in a last-minute out-of-High-Court settlement left Hobbs with six-figure costs; it was reported that the settlement included a cash sum as well as the transfer of items from joint ownership. He also resigned from the British Antique Dealers’ Association after it announced an investigation into his business.
Hobbs always maintained that he had never knowingly sold fakes, and only ever bought “when an object moves me”. He insisted that while he knew that Buggins made replicas, any such items sold in his shop were labelled as imitations. In 2010 he announced that he had embarked on a memoir of his 40 years in the trade, which he had given the working title of Honest John.
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In his heyday many of the most prominent American decorators bought from Hobbs, with the result that now questionable pieces can be found in numerous New York and Hollywood residences. Among his customers were Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft, Sir Elton John, Trudie Styler, the actress and wife of Sting, Valentino Garavani, the Italian fashion designer, the actress Jennifer Aniston, John Thain the American banker, the corporate raider Saul Steinberg, the Getty family and the New York interior designer Tony Ingrao.
John Hobbs was the elder son and second of four children of Sydney Charles Hobbs, until 1968 proprietor of Odds & Hobbs, a small general antiques shop in the Kings Road, and Beatrice Appleyard, known as Kitty, who was originally from Bradford and during the 1930s had worked as a barmaid at The Garter in Putney. John was born in St Albans in 1946, and he worked with his father from the age of 14 during his schooldays. An older contemporary at St Mark’s School, Fulham, who later became a close friend, was John Bindon, the notorious hardman, actor and occasional antiques dealer, with whom Hobbs shared a reputation for sometimes explosive violence and enthusiastic womanising.
In the early 1960s Hobbs worked briefly in a fashionable West End hairdresser’s before teaming up with a partner as a knocker. Knockers — not all of whom came from Brighton as was popularly believed — toured respectable areas using a mixture of charm, guile and sometimes menace on the “good cop, bad cop” model, to persuade householders to part with antique furniture and works of art, which they then sold on to dealers, often very profitably. By the early 1970s Hobbs was able to set up as a dealer himself with a space in the Kings Road Furniture Cave. His younger brother Carlton took a nearby space in 1973, and for a while they established a formal partnership. However, they were very different characters, and by 1992 relations, both business and personal, had broken down in acrimony. Carlton re-established an independent business in New York.
Hobbs soon became a feature of the fashionable Kings Road set, including actors, directors and writers such as Nell Dunn, Carol White and Oliver Reed, and was notable for his consumption of a variety stimulants, even in an over-indulgent period. His business soon outgrew the Furniture Cave, and he transferred it to an extensive warren of showrooms spreading back from a modest entrance in Dove Walk, the discreet mews behind Chelsea Barracks off the Pimlico Road.
He built up a reputation for impeccable, if flamboyant, taste. According to the American magazine Town & Country, that and “his cocksure personality, has made his Pimlico Road gallery a canteen for confident nabobs uninterested in duplicating their neighbours’ living rooms down to the last Chippendale chair”. At the end of the 1980s he was quick to see the potential of the collapse of the Soviet empire and to offer antique Russian furniture from sources in Northern Europe.
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In 2002 when he sent a large collection of furniture for sale in a New York auction, Thierry Millerand, director of the auctioneers Phillips’s French and Continental furniture department wrote: “John has a penchant for furniture and objects on a theatrical grand scale and has had unique access to some of the greatest English country house and European collections during his 40 years in the antique furniture business in London. He has the ability to find unusual and unique objects of the highest quality.” Later sales of his stock have been marketed in rather different terms, and hedged about with caveats.
Hobbs was married firstly to Lola Wigan and then to Delores King, both marriages ending in divorce. He is survived by three children.
John Hobbs, antiques dealer, was born on May 18, 1946. He died after a long illness on March 13, 2011, aged 64