Moving house inevitably involves a careful re-evaluation of all your possessions, and decisions about which do —and which do not— come with you to your new home. But “master plaster caster” Peter Hone is more ruthless than most.
Hone, 82, is auctioning the entire contents of the Notting Hill apartment he has called home since the 1960s in advance of his move to Penzance in Cornwall.
“We will be selling everything, from the tiniest bone-china eggcup to his canopied four poster bed,” says Lay’s Auctioneers, who will be putting all 336 items under the hammer on 12 October. “Quite literally, everything must go.”
As a long-time collector of architectural fragments, classical busts, urns, marbles and curios, as well as a creator of plasterwork himself, Hone’s apartment —once described as “an orphanage of things”— is filled with items.
His plaster reliefs cover almost every available inch of wall space, with a 182cm-wide circular pine table in the centre of his living space, dressed in a velvet cloth and stacked with a 132-piece royal dinner set dating from 1800 and valued at up to £1,800.
“[An auction like this] is extremely rare – it’s almost one of a kind,” says Aaron Chiffers, who handles creative direction for Lay’s. “There’s high works —these thousands of pound statues and exquisite and rare artefacts— and his plaster works, but also his kitchenalia: beakers, cups, saucers. It’s a whole house with everything you’d expect.”
Unusually, all 336 items have been available to view in Hone’s Notting Hill flat this month, with the owner (and his Parson Russell Terrier, Bude) in residence.
“It’s not just the items, but the way he’s curated the design. It’s so uniquely Peter,” says Chiffers. “This is years of work. It’s a life’s work, in terms of his eye and his understanding of how to put things together.”
Remarkably, this is not Hone’s first clear-out. In 2016, he auctioned 143 items with Christie’s. It two cranes five days to move his ten-tonne collection, and since then, Hone has started afresh.
As well as the bone-china egg cup (expected to fetch between £20 and £30) and the four-poster bed (£800 to £1200), other items for sale include a royal umbrella (£100 to £200) a wooden walking stick with a concealed saw (£200 to £300) and a stone axe head, found by Hone in a cutlery box purchased from an auction house in Marylebone.
There is even a handstitched booklet belonging to Princess Diana’s great, great grandmother, detailing the balls she attended and the partners she danced with. It is expected to achieve between £300 and £400.
Hone’s collection includes 66 plaster reliefs, 50 sculptures and 26 ceramics and glasses.
Hone’s own plaster creations are also for sale, like a plaster panel cast from the Roman marble sarcophagus at the Kunsthistoriches Museum in Vienna, casts of Keats and Johnson and a bust of the Roman emperor Carcalla (sold with two pairs of plaster capitals).
“It’s hard to pick out one highlight,” says Chiffers. “There’s a gorgeous Gothic table, Lot 117, that’s a had a lot of interest. It’s quite stunning…His own plasters are lovely. The leaves and fauna are gorgeous. There’s an artwork by Lord Leighton. Everything he has, down to the cutlery, has history and provenance to it.”
A plaster figure of a classical woman, dating from the early 19th century, is expected to be the auction’s biggest sale, with an estimated price of £10,000 to £12,000.
It is followed by a lead bust of George I, at between £6,000 and £8,000, and four sections of a Coade stone fireplace depicting two women standing on curved pedestals, at between £4,000 and £5,000.
At Hone’s 2016 auction, however, his items sold for considerably more than their estimated price. A Roman marble head of a goddess, for example, sold for £68,750 – four times its expected price.
The Times reported that 94 per cent of the items auctioned were purchased by an Australian buyer, John Schaeffer, who intended to start a Hone Museum in Sydney. In 2020, however, he was killed by a lorry, and the items were brought back to London and sold at Bonham’s the following year.
According to Chiffers, it’s likely that a single buyer may invest in multiple pieces at Thursday’s auction.
“The themes are concurrent…even though we’ve got busts, friezes, plaster casts, furniture – it all talks the same language. You could dip in and buy one or two things, but you could literally recreate Peter’s interior, if you wanted to.”
Hone, who grew up in an orphanage during the Second World War, began his career as a pastry chef, and has since worked for British Rail, as a museum guard, tour guide and a civil servant.
In the 1960s and 70s, he owned an antiques business in north London specialising in four-poster beds, where he reportedly sold to The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and members of the aristocracy.
Hone spent 15 years working at the Clifton Nurseries, a garden centre in Little Venice, where he ran a garden and architectural antiques shop for Lord Jacob Rothschild and became interested in plasterwork.
“Asking how many plaster casts I’ve made in my life is like asking how many peas one’s podded in the pea factory," he told the Wall Street Journal in 2013. "Stand still long enough and you’ll be cast!"
Hone is moving to Penzance, where Lay’s is based, to start a new chapter. “He wants everything to go, but he still loves these things. They’ve had a life with Peter, and they’re ready for a life beyond Peter,” says Chiffers. “It’s a remarkable sale from a unique person. I’m very excited to see what happens on Thursday.”
