Perfect for Frankenstein

CHRIS HOLMES didn’t realise who the tall, blonde woman who bought the large copper bath from him was, until others at the antiques fair where he was trading pointed out she was American actress Gwyneth Paltrow.

“I still didn’t know who they were talking about,” says Chris, who wouldn’t recognise a Hollywood A-lister if they were signing autographs under his nose. But he can spot a 15th Century French table, an ancient Roman artefact or a rare, 200-year-old religious relic at 100 paces.

Chris isn’t interested in celebrity. His passion is for history, antiques and cutting-edge design, which is the driving force behind the successful business he has built up over the past 15 years.

When Kaiser Chiefs singer and BBC TV’s The Voice coach Ricky Wilson walked into his shop in Harrogate, Chris, who rarely watches television, asked if he wouldn’t mind help him lug some heavy furniture up and down the stairs. “I didn’t have a clue who he was,” says Chris of the down-to-earth Leeds based pop star, who clearly didn’t mind, as he has been into the shop a few times since.

Locals along this exclusive shopping street, Cold Bath Road, have also reported seeing Bond star Daniel Craig, who has a home nearby, eyeing up antiques here. But Chris says he hasn’t noticed.

The Malton-born dealer is known for sourcing unique period pieces for film and TV productions and has recently provided much of the set for the new 20th Century Fox Frankenstein film, starring James McAvoy and Daniel Radcliffe, including a huge, gothic “operating table”, carved with crosses, which he discovered in a disused nunnery. “They asked me not to clean it up, to leave the cobwebs on it,” he says.

He is also in demand to help furnish the interiors of fashionable restaurants and designer stores with his unique finds – including Fuller’s flagship pub at the recently revamped King’s Cross Station, Superdry, Jack Wills, Liberty and Anthropologie. Old industrial pieces, which he blasts, polishes and adapts using sheets of thick glass or steel to give them a modern designer edge, are particularly popular.

New York designers are also queuing up for Chris’s stock. Recently, he shipped out the entire contents of an old Yorkshire stately home stable block – including bronze fittings and original stable doors – for the interior of a particularly funky restaurant in the city. Another high-profile American client bought old oak desks that came from a school in Leeds, complete with rude graffiti.

“They were for a 100-year-old restaurant in New York and the designers thought the graffiti was hilarious, real English schoolboy stuff.

They told me not to clean it off, just put glass tops on and left them as they were.”

Chris opened his shop, which houses everything from ancient artefacts and 17th Century decorative furnishings to religious statues and modern artwork, as well as the industrial and architectural salvage to which he adds his own, unique contemporary twist, three-and-a-half years ago.

After years of travelling the country selling at antique fairs, Chris wanted to give customers a base. “This was just to be the face of the business, I didn’t expect it to do as well as it has,” he says. “I am doing an incredible amount of buying and selling locally.

He has hit lucky in Harrogate, one of the wealthiest towns in the country. As well as big name stars, he is increasingly attracting customers from London who recognise they get better value for their money here, in addition to local North Yorkshire folk.

He sees lots of 20 and 30-somethings who have become disenchanted with Ikea and want something different, but doesn’t sell much on the internet. “I can’t source it fast enough as it is,” says Chris, who now sells much more abroad.

The turning point came, he says, two-and-a-half years ago, when a girl walking past his shop took a picture of two stone lions on her phone to show her mother in Australia and asked if he could ship them to Sydney.

Chris, who has worked in the haulage industry, recalls: “Knowing how the business worked, I was easily able to find space on a container for just £75.

I realised things were changing then. I ship lots abroad now.”

Self-taught, he left school at 16. Having bought and sold things since he was just nine years old, when he was dragged around jumble sales and car boot fairs by his mother, who dabbled in antiques, he knew that was what he wanted to do. But initially, he worked as transport manager in the family haulage business until, after four years, his father did him a favour and fired him. “I was stuck in the same place in a suit and tie and never got out. Dad had the good sense to sack me. He saw that I wasn’t enjoying it and told me to go away and do something that made me happy.”

That was when Chris started buying and selling full time. “I am very competitive. I soon realised people were buying off me to sell at larger antique fairs, so I started selling at Newark, the biggest in Europe.”

Thanks to his contacts, Chris is regularly called to clear out some of the larger old country houses in Britain and Ireland. “It’s wordof- mouth. This business is all about recommendation and trust,” he says.

When he started out, an Italian expert gave him valuable advice. “He said once a week, without fail, I should go to a stately home or art gallery to see and touch items. I needed to understand the quality of a statue or the beauty of a 17th Century painting. I have never forgotten that, and I still do it, every week without fail. I’m learning all the time.”

Thanks to that advice, Chris spotted the value of a set of 16th Century wooden carved theatrical figures, part of the stage set from a travelling show, now in his shop, which builders discovered in the attic of a thatched house in Malton. Slots at the back reveal where the figures were fitted onto the poles of the travelling cart where plays were performed. “I saw similar ones in the British Museum, that’s how I knew what they were,” says Chris.

He gets his biggest thrill from finding things other people miss. “At antique fairs, I was noticed for buying mad things, like huge industrial work benches that I would blast and polish, but not too much, so they held their age. I would use high quality craftsmen to finish them off and order especially thick sheets of glass to put on top. Other dealers were saying ‘Who are you going to sell that to?’ “I turned up once with a pile of old Victorian coffins, bonkers things like that.” Chris has gathered rare items from disused church buildings and offices through a Vatican contact.

“Everyone laughed at the 20ft long gothic tables I got from the nunnery, but one sold straight away and the other is in the Frankenstein movie.”

Old wooden pigeon holes from an RAF base in Lincoln, once used for holding nuts and bolts, are now filled with ‘body parts’ in the operating theatre set of Frankenstein. Chris’s pieces were also used on the set of the Little Dorritt BBC TV drama series.

His childlike passion for discovery shines through as he talks about latest finds, such as a 3,000 year old Iranian bronze goat necklace he has just sold. He points to two lead planters from Blenheim Palace, selling for £1,600, and a Saxon stone head priced at £4,000. But there are also items to suit a tight budget, such as the 2,000-year-old Roman pot at £40 and Victorian glass bottles at £5 each. “You never know what or who is going to turn up at the door. That’s what I love,” says Chris, who enjoys buying trips throughout Europe. “There is a real sense of freedom, a feeling of never having to grow up, and I love finding out the history of things, the stories behind them.”

Unusual recent finds include religious relics containing saints’ bones dating back to the 1800s and an early Lutheran Bible, printed in German, found in a house in Leeds. “Someone had the faith to risk imprisonment when they printed it at the time,” he says.

Chris confesses he is a hoarder. “I’m a mad collector, I find it difficult to detach myself,” he says.

There are two items he will never sell. One is a letter from the Battle of the Somme, written from the trenches on parchment cut from an observatory balloon British troops had shot down. “It’s from a Leeds lad, telling his wife not to worry, that he’ll be home safe and to ignore what everyone’s saying because it’s not that bad. It must have been absolute hell, he was blatantly lying. How do you put a value on that?” says Chris.

The second is a whalebone trinket box from Hull with the words “Think on me when this you see” engraved on it. Inside there is an antislavery token. These were given out at Hullborn Wilberforce’s anti-slavery demonstrations in the early 1800s.

“To find little things like these, which have been rattling around for hundreds of years in drawers, is amazing,” says Chris.

• Chris Holmes Decorative Interiors, 57 Cold Bath Road, Harrogate HG2 ONL. T: 01423-522031; M: 07771-962494; E: chrisholmesdecorativeinteriors.co.uk
• Chris’s partner Chloe Holt’s original contemporary paintings can also be bought at his shop W: chloeholt.co.uk