LAPADA, London’s premier antiques fair, returns to Berkeley Square with first-class exhibitors, fine art and design, and well-heeled crowds
Members of The Association of Art & Antiques (LAPADA) particularly welcome taking part in its Berkeley Square fair. After a three-year, COVID-19-imposed hiatus, the fair, which this year runs until October 1, has made a triumphant return. Although billing itself as “an art fair”, it showcases other categories of treasures, too – chiefly design as well as some jewellery.
The fair’s organisers and dealers enjoy a symbiotic relationship, each party capitalising on its respective strengths to help make the event a success: “As a trade association, we promise to find members commercial opportunities,” says Freya Simms, LAPADA’s CEO. “For us, the Berkeley Square venue – in the heart of Mayfair – is the jewel in the crown. It’s a prestigious location which means it needs to be the best of the best, particularly after three years of us not having been able to host a fair.”
Dealers fulfil their side of the bargain by raising the standards of the stands, she adds: “This year, the exhibitors have really upped their game with their displays, for example by including taller or more interesting cabinets.”
The Berkeley Square spot, with its eccentrically sloping terrain and towering trees, gives the fair a unique character. Indeed, visitors witness nature and culture collide within its tent to rather surreal effect. “Another USP here is the wonderful 230-year-old plane trees that punctuate the fair’s interior. We have to build the fair around them and be very careful. When you go to a stand with a tree in it, there’s a pretty lovely feeling. We have to build the fair’s floor about one metre above ground at one end of the square. The floor isn’t completely flat, so there’s a slight lean, another nice reminder of where you are as you’re walking around.”
Effect takes an inquisitive meander round the fair, picking out five key highlights:
1. Joyful eclecticism at The Berkeley Square Collective
One way to appreciate the variety of pieces at the fair is to step into the Berkeley Square Collective stand, designed by high-profile interior design studio Maddux Creative. “As you find in all our projects, it features a healthy mix of antique and contemporary things, provided by different LAPADA dealers,” says Jo leGleud, co-founder of Maddux Creative. “The scale of the space lent itself to conjuring up a one-bed or studio apartment. The space incorporates a dining table, dining chairs, a dressing table and bar area – many people’s dream of how they’d like to live. What we love about LAPADA is how passionate and informed the gallery owners are about what they show, and that’s very inspiring to us.”
Eclecticism runs riot in this richly colourful stand with cranberry-red walls. Its mix of pieces includes a carpet by Art Deco and Modernist designer Paule Leleu from carpet and tapestry specialist C John, a round dining table provided by Butchoff and armchairs by André Groult, French designer of furniture in the Art Deco style, supplied by London-based Crosta Smith Gallery. A fabulous pair of early-20th-century Revival chinoiserie mirrors from John Bly elevate one side of the booth (as seen on right of article head image). Recent figurative paintings by Jenya Datsko, depicting chic social gatherings sometimes hinting at underlying tensions, inject an unexpectedly contemporary feel into the space.
2. Unabashed opulence – the French Empire style
Close by is the stand of Brighton-based dealer Adrian Alan, whose style is similarly eclectic. Hung on one wall are two dramatic, monumental, halo-like mirrors. “They are 1920s Art Deco mirrors and feel like religious icons with their halo-shaped frames,” says director Giles Forster. The two mirrors are not only gloriously opulent but repay time spent analysing them in depth, as Forster reveals. “They recall France’s Sun King, Louis XIV. Hung next to each other, the mirrors look like eyes. The halo frames had the effect of glorifying the person looking into the mirrors. In a way, they are the ultimate expression of vanity.” He says such flamboyant items appeal to collectors today, given a preference among many now for maximalism and eclecticism: “We’ve turned a corner in interiors recently, moving from hotel-style minimalism to a more opulent style, to mixing and matching.”
The gallery sells many ornate pieces from the Empire period or in an Empire-inspired style. Indeed, the objects it displays are an education in terms of the many permutations of the Neo-Classical style that flourished in the 19th century, such as the Néo-Grec (or Pompeiian) idiom (inspired by 18th-century excavations in Pompeii). On show are scaled-down reproductions of temples acquired by devotees of the Grand Tour, who would have transported them across the Alps on a horse and carriage. Other eye-catching pieces here include two Napoleon III gilt-bronze side cabinets with lacquered doors – designed circa 1865 by Charles-Guillaume Winckelsen, a cabinet-maker from the Napoleon III period – and a Néo-Grec jardinière made circa 1870 by French metalworker and manufacturer Ferdinand Barbédienne.
3. The intricacy of wood-inlaid furniture
Hooking many visitors’ attention a few stands away is a show-stopping, tilt-top table, dating from circa 1850, displayed by Kent-based gallery Lennox Cato Antiques & Works of Art. Its spectacular, carefully restored circular top, supported by a rosewood base, is inlaid with indigenous woods from the Galle district of Sri Lanka, such as palm, tamarind and calamander. At the centre of the top is an old ivory disc, inscribed with an image of an elephant, registered with the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra).
“It was specially commissioned as a dining table,” says the company’s owner Lennox Cato. “With its kaleidoscope of wood tones shaped like swirling, radiating petals, it’s a statement piece. But it was made to be used, for people to eat off, while also considered very special.”
4. A homage to Art Deco greats
Offering a more restrained and elegant yet still highly luxurious style is the furniture at the joint stand of Crosta Smith Gallery and Berlin-based gallery Guelfucci. Here, a room set has been created in the style of the ensembles – the term for the fully furnished spaces found in such French design fairs as the Salon des Artistes Décorateurs in the early 20th century. While clearly made of high-quality materials in the Modernist and Art Deco styles, the pieces have a clean-lined simplicity. These include a handsome, semicircular mahogany desk by Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann, designed 1936, and later manufactured by his nephew, Alfred Porteneuve from Guelfucci. This stands on a circular rug with a pattern of concentric circles, designed by Porteneuve.
Against one wall of the stand is a streamlined, walnut-veneer sideboard by architect and designer Pierre Chareau, from Crosta Smith. Its drawers behind doors have a secret locking mechanism. Only the owner is likely to know that a button concealed inside the piece allows the drawers to open. Chareau is famous for his design of the iconic, radically Modernist Maison de Verre, France’s first house made of steel and glass, completed in 1932. Nearby is a daybed with a walnut frame, also designed by Ruhlmann circa 1932, from Guelfucci. Its soft seating and bolsters, each adorned with a tassel, is covered with an exquisitely pale, delicately patterned fabric from French fabric house Prelle.
5. Modern-looking antique jewellery
At jewellery gallery Facet & Fable, co-founded by Eva Reynolds and Zoë Robinson, there are examples of startlingly modern-looking yet old jewellery, arrayed in glass-topped cabinets with tapered legs in a Neo-Classical style. Appropriately, the cabinets once graced the Mayfair flagship store of jewellery and silverware emporium Asprey (before it was revamped in 2013). There are plenty of pieces here, which, despite dating from the 19th century, look eminently wearable.
Robinson unlocks a cabinet to show me an 18ct-gold bracelet composed of tiny, interconnected discs that give it a fluid quality: “Its articulated structure makes it look like it’s melting over your wrists,” she says, while demonstrating its slinky quality. It has a 1960s vibe about it (think the chainmail dresses of Paco Rabanne). Another piece here is an ingenious bracelet hinged in two places so that it can fit different sizes of wrist. It was made in the 1880s but its style is so pared-down it could almost hail from the Art Deco era.
LAPADA Fair runs 22 September – 1 October London at Berkeley Square, London
Read more: Design Fairs | Design | Art | Interior Designers I Interiors | Antiques | Vintage | Mid-Century | London