Chez Gordon Watson, Tangier
Antique dealer, Gordon Watson, spent several years restoring his airy masterpiece of a house in Tangier, writes Deborah Needleman, artfully managing to leave its historical integrity intact while imbuing its interior architecture with a modern sensibility. The rooms are all bright and open, giving the impression of a light breeze from the nearby sea passing through them.
Yet, by his own account, Watson is an obsessive collector. “It’s a mania,” he says. “It’s not natural how much I buy, and how much I need to buy.” And indeed, these large rooms boast thousands of marvelous objects, but remarkably, particularly for a collector, the interiors never seem cluttered or like a catalogued inventory of goods. Each object is carefully offset by a clarity in the space it occupies—what is known in art as negative space.
This is an extract from an article by Deborah Needleman, published in Cabana Magazine Issue 14.