The great rooms of Parnham are not curated in any conventional sense. There is no single period, no dominant palette, no overriding aesthetic thesis. What there is, instead, is a quality of attention — a sense that every object in every room has been looked at very carefully before being placed, and that the looking has never quite stopped.
James Perkins began collecting in his twenties, when he bought a Victorian taxidermy case from a market in Portobello Road. He did not know, at the time, that he was beginning anything. He simply liked it. The case contained a kingfisher, a wren, and something that might have been a warbler, arranged on a branch of artificial moss. He still has it. It sits in the library at Parnham, next to a Jurassic ammonite the size of a dinner plate and a small bronze by an artist whose name he has forgotten.
This is how the collection works. Not by category or period, not by value or provenance, but by a kind of instinct that has been refined over decades of looking. The ichthyosaur came from a fossil dealer in Lyme Regis. The pair of Louis Vuitton trunks — monogrammed, battered, magnificent — came from a house sale in the Loire. The flying giraffe came from his own studio. Each arrived because it was right, and because being right was the only criterion that mattered.
What the collection teaches, if it teaches anything, is that the rules of the interior are not rules at all. They are habits. And habits, unlike rules, can be broken without consequence — provided you break them with conviction.
