In Good Hands: A Young Antique Dealer's Elegant Rental in Holland Park

HOUSE TOUR | ROOMS & GARDENS | WORLD OF CABANA

An apartment in West London's Holland Park, long since divided from its original ambitions, has become the testing ground for a conservator-turned-dealer, where friendship, repair, and the steady passing on of objects shape an interior in continual flux. Emma Becque steps inside Adam Calvert-Bentley's antique-filled home.

BY EMMA BECQUE | ROOMS & GARDENS | 11 APRIL 2026

In London's Holland Park, grandeur rarely arrives intact; the stuccoed houses, all pale assurance and improving aspiration, were built in the 1860s for prosperous families expected to decorate them with enough furniture to justify a procession of lofty rooms.

The scheme did not entirely come off, and as Holland Park-based antique dealer Adam Calvert Bentley explains, they were built on spec, “in the hopes that they could fill them with wealthy, new middle-class families”. But quite soon they realised that they couldn’t sell, he says, revealing that many were divided into apartments with surprising speed.

That history still lingers in the rooms Bentley now occupies on the park’s edge, although lingers is perhaps the wrong word for spaces of this scale. The ceilings are infinite, the proportions verge on the theatrical, and a fireplace in the sitting room sits slightly off center because the vast room once extended into what is now the kitchen.

Bentley notices such things. After 15 years as a conservator, first at Westland London and then at Plowden & Smith, he has developed the habit of looking at objects, and evidently buildings, searching for what has happened to them as much as for what they are.

This makes him a fitting tenant in a place that is itself a perfect example of continuation, a rental being, after all, an arrangement of temporary custody, much like an antiques business. Bentley deals with Cindy Chetwode from a Battersea showroom, and it was Chetwode who offered him and his partner the apartment, having once lived there herself while working at the V&A before utilising it as a pied-à-terre.

“Cindy is a best friend. There’s a huge age gap. It doesn’t matter. Sometimes you meet people, and you just connect.” The place remains hers in one sense but not entirely in another, having been lent, revived and, in time, perhaps reclaimed, while in the present it is held together by friendship, taste and the agreeable instability of borrowed things. 

That sense of stewardship rather than ownership gives the interior its tone, avoiding the usual pieties of dealing and instead favoring use. “I live with my pieces. I’m not precious about anything. I look after things.” Much of what sits here is technically stock, which means chairs leave, footstools emigrate, and mirrors develop a sudden destiny the moment he grows fond of them, requiring a constant process of rearrangement. What emerges is less a showroom than a domestic relay, in which objects pass through the space rather than settle permanently. “Sometimes things get sold, so you move things around,” Bentley says. 

One of the most striking elements in the sitting room belong to Chetwode: an early 19th-century French wallpaper panel salvaged from a wall and hand-stretched, along with the lingering memory of Portobello Road. Bentley notes that De Gournay now reproduces the pattern, thereby highlighting the appeal of the original.

Around it, the interior unfolds as something more edited, with 18th-century watercolors of Renaissance artists, found already framed, lining the bookcase, while Egyptian fragments sit among books and busts, including a sarcophagus mask acquired, he says, as a “consolation prize” after a whole sarcophagus escaped at auction. Nearby, a fragmentary frieze from a Portuguese collection is something he "hopes" is 2000 years old.

Conservation, in Bentley's hands, is not about freezing things in time but about keeping them in circulation, whether through restoring a pair of wall lights modelled on those owned by Marie Antoinette, which were, he says, “very dirty”. Or, repairing a French mirror in the bedroom, reinforcing a cracked stone panel in the hall or adjusting a pair of lamps inspired by torches excavated at Pompeii and Herculaneum so that they can be styled as a pair. There are no 'do not touch' signs around Bentley’s home; instead, visitors are encouraged to hold, feel and get a sense of history in today's consumer-centric world.

Even the inconveniences are folded into the scheme, with radiator cupboards described as “the bane of my life” for the way they limit what can be placed against the walls, which are used to prop a series of ceramics and jewels. The dining table, made by Bentley to fit the room, takes its cue from imperial porphyry, the stone of emperors’ tombs, and manages to be both grand and faintly tongue-in-cheek, allowing ancient reference and domesticity to sit together.

The bedroom continues this sentiment, with a towering four-poster painted by John Fowler for his house in Scotland, an 18th-century piece, forming the center of a room that belongs as much to Chetwode as to Bentley. The curtains were copied from the original chintz, and the interior lining was created by Melissa Wyndham. 

Irish bedside cupboards, adapted from a larger piece, sit comfortably beside it, while the overall effect showcases the craftsmanship across different eras and hands. “We have delusions of grandeur,” Bentley says, though the room conveys a humble English cottage charm.

Friendship runs through the interior as insistently as history, with Jonathan Bourne, another business partner of Bentley’s, contributing to its arrangement, Carlos Garcia’s sofa arriving as a gift, cushions sourced from Vera Grenney’s car boot sale, and a chaise at the end of the bed having been lent to Colefax and Fowler before returning in green gingham. “Do you want to borrow anything else?” the antique dealer says.

“They do keep borrowing stuff.” Borrowing, lending, restoring, selling, inheriting and adapting become part of the same cycle, in which possession is secondary to use.

Bentley also speaks, with the seriousness of someone slightly amused by the idea, about the “energy” of objects, noting that some sit unnoticed for years before attracting sudden interest, while others never quite settle. A mirror in his previous flat lingered for years before finding buyers the week he had to leave, a coincidence or maybe “its time to move on”.

What distinguishes this interior is not its handsome aesthetic, though it is, nor that Bentley has a sharp eye, though he does, but that it resists the fiction of singular authorship, instead presenting rooms as accumulations of borrowing and adjustment when life throws curveballs. In making a home out of continuity rather than control, he demonstrates that in Holland Park, where grandeur has so often been divided and redistributed, such an approach may be the grandest gesture available.