Why you shouldn't be scared to hang art in your home

Featured on telegraph.co.uk

The latest interior design fashions – crockery splattered lightly with paint, feature walls that have had the Farrow & Ball treatment, or Indian-inspired upholstery – cannot fabricate a sense of soul in your home.

That “lived-in” feel is created by the knick-knacks, photographs and paintings displayed throughout the house, and while your “art collection” may or may not help to sell your property eventually, it will give it a personality.

“You can buy wonderful things every day of the week,” says Orlando Rock, the UK chairman of the art auction house Christie’s, which celebrates its 250th anniversary this year. He points at a giant turtle shell on the wall in his office in St James’s, London, which he bought in an antique shop.

“The only way I could carry it was to put it on my back. I walked out of the shop to get the bus and bumped into a group of Australian tourists. I had to pose for about 15 photographs,” he says.

In his line of work, the Old Etonian handles some of the world’s most valuable pieces, but believes great art work should be accessible to everyone.

“One always reads about things that make a fortune at auction, but 80 per cent of the things that we sell are affordable. An 18th-century chair can cost the same as a modern chair,” he says. Rock discovered this early on, traipsing around after his father who was a compulsive collector. “Most of my childhood was spent running around auction houses and dealers, because my dad would be buying yet another thing that was going to be smuggled home.”

Growing up, Rock’s ambition was to work at Christie’s, he tells the Telegraph in his first interview as UK chairman, a mantle he took on last October. Since joining in 1990, he has worked in the English picture department, valuations, furniture, country house sales, with a brief stint in New York, before setting up the house sales and collection teams in London.

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