When the door to Peter Adler’s flat opens, it’s like entering Tutankhamun’s tomb or Ali Baba’s cave. There isn’t an inch of wall or floor without its treasures, brought back from Peter’s travels. The flat is like a grand bazaar: India jostles with Thailand, Bali, China, Japan, Peru, Ghana, Cameroon and Nigeria.
Where others might have a shoe-rack in their hall, Peter, owner of jewellery company Pebble London, has a low trestle table piled with conch and cowrie shells. Above the shells hang rows of necklaces, some of Peter’s own design, others sewn from old silk saris by a women’s charity in India. Brightest are the hanging Thai pompom garlands dyed turquoise and fuchsia. “You have to love a pompom,” says Peter. “So cheering.”
In the drawing room two Bengal cats – both called Mitsu, the name he’s given every cat he’s ever had – hold court. “King of all he surveys,” says Peter of the Mitsu sitting on the sphinx. They have a knack of weaving between the statues, fossils, corals and gourds without ever knocking over so much as a scarab beetle. Only once have they caused serious damage. One of them chased a fly up an 18th-century Mughal embroidery from Palampur in India. There’s a great claw-rip in the tapestry. It’s being taken to the Victoria and Albert Museum for restoration.The cats sleep in hammock-like slings of mosquito net above Peter’s bed.
Visitors without cat-like balance tiptoe between mosaic masks, rose quartz crystals, tortoise shells, filigree bird cages, drawers of agate slices and malachite bangles, silver torques from China, feathered wreaths from Cameroon, gold headdresses from Sumatra (one borrowed by Paloma Faith for her performace at the 2013 Baftas; others destined for the costume department at the Metropolitan Opera).There’s also bunting strung with plastic chillies and strawberries.
Sitting on an ikat-print divan, Peter notices his shoelaces are undone. One trip and the whole place would be smithereens.
Peter was born in California, but the family moved to London when he was four. He learned to play piano, cello and saxophone and, after university, he toured the US with Irish R&B band Bluesville. He became fascinated by Native American Indian culture. Since then he has travelled the world buying antique crafts and textiles and making sketches for his own designs.
“I spend my life moving things around,” he says, as he looks for somewhere to put his cup of tea. In the kitchen, tiled with mismatched Portuguese majolicas, lunch is prepared on the solitary square foot of free counter.All cooking is overseen by two-dozen Peruvian cloth dolls, thought to be votive images of servants taken into the after-life. Where others would have a spice rack, Peter has a glass-fronted cabinet of miniatures. “The only criteria is that you have to be tiny,” he says.
The light-well at the back of the flat is an oasis. Elephant tiles from Jaipur stampede across the walls, jasmine creeps over a trellis and ferns flourish even in this concrete patch between tall houses. Does he ever dust, in this extraordinary place of a thousand objects? “Dust?” he says, as if he’s never thought of it before. “Dust? Whoever heard of such a thing?”
