Fancy a dino skeleton or stuffed lion?

Times

07-05-2025

You can never quite trust your eyes at Parnham Park, the Dorset home of the music entrepreneur James Perkins. At first sight it's an Instagram-perfect Elizabethan manor house, sprawling and honey-coloured, with castellated walls and high chimneys and a manicured ornamental garden. Close-up, however, much of it is a ruined shell. Large sections are roofless, wisteria snakes around the stone mullions of glassless windows and in several places saplings sprout within.
Indoors, there are bigger surprises. The high-ceilinged entrance hall is a dense jungle of vast natural curiosities. Visitors must weave their way past, among others, the towering skeleton of a giraffe, the tusks of a broad mammoth skeleton, a walrus skull and a small stuffed giraffe. Other specimens glower from the brick walls: a prehistoric elk skull, a bronze resin rhinoceros head, several gilt-and-agate butterflies, a fossilised ichthyosaur, still in the slab of rock it was found in, and a vast, 50-million-year-old fossilised palm frond.
The broad mammoth skeleton and a stuffed giraffe are part of the menagerie
It's like being lost in a forgotten store room at the Natural History Museum — except it's more unsettling than that. Especially when you notice that the butterflies are in fact wall lamps, or that the giraffe skeleton is wearing Louboutins.
'I wanted to go for a Jurassic Dr Dolittle feel,' Perkins says, ushering me through. But fantastic beasts are only part of what his house offers. The inhabited section — the west wing — is what he genially describes as 'a cacophony of curiosities and eccentricities'. There are artworks, fossils, knick-knacks, taxidermy, statement furniture, old and new, all artfully jumbled together.
A pair of ostrich-feather lamps, an esoteric UFO and a 19th-century Italian marble table feature in a sitting room
In a corner of one sitting room a rumpled armchair (a silk damask upholstered modern imitation of a traditional Howard & Son design) is within touching distance of a pair of pink ostrich-feather lamps, a 19th-century Italian marble table, an ammonite-encrusted sandstone specimen, a bronze leaf console table, and a Constable-style oil painting that includes a small UFO. Upstairs, a William IV mahogany sidetable supports a 195-million-year-old ichthyosaur skeleton, whose beak points towards a stuffed lion, wearing a gilt crown, that sits on an old Louis Vuitton trunk. It's all a bit bonkers, but the more you see, the harder it is to resist.
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The cacophony includes works by big-name modern creators — prints by Damien Hirst, sculptures and lamps by Jacques Duval-Brasseur — and works created by Perkins himself, often via the small 'studio' of artists he employs or through his avant-garde furniture collection, A Modern Grand Tour. But most of the objects we encounter are just things he has picked up on his travels. There is little explicit rhyme or reason. 'It's just how my mind works. It's a brain dump. There are all these wonderful things in this wonderful world, and I want to show them.'
The collection includes prints by Damien Hirst and sculptures and lamps by Jacques Duval-Brasseur
Perkins is, he admits, 'a compulsive collector. If you visit a museum in a foreign city, I'll probably be in the basement, haggling over something. I've got 4,500 plaster casts and 2,000 wooden moulds…' Yet his current aim is to reduce his collection, not add to it.
Next week, 451 of Perkins's treasures will be sold off in an auction at Dreweatts in Newbury. Potential bidders can view the lots in the house, just outside Beaminster, on a succession of open days from May 9 to May 12. If you're even remotely intrigued, it's a great chance to poke around.
'I wanted to go for a Jurassic Dr Dolittle feel'
The auction is expected to raise about £1.3 million, and Parnham will feel bare when the lots and the visitors have left. But the grade I listed building will gratefully soak up the proceeds, because it is in urgent need of restoration.
Back in 2019, when Perkins acquired it, the house was a charred, empty ruin. Two years earlier it had been gutted by fire, in a catastrophic conflagration that police considered 'suspicious'. (The previous owner, the Austrian hedge fund tycoon Michael Treichl, was found drowned in Lake Geneva a few weeks later.) Perkins paid a knock-down price of £2.5 million for what was left, and set about trying to bring one of Britain's most exquisite and historic stately homes back to life.
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Most of the objects are things Perkins has picked up on his travels
The full plan was to restore the house and develop the estate (helped by the award-winning designer and architect Thomas Heatherwick) to be an ultra-exclusive retreat for the super-rich and super-famous — a venue for weddings and parties and discreet getaways, with White Lotus levels of service — with assorted purpose-built cottages in the grounds bringing the total bedroom count to about 60. Perkins was undaunted by the size of the undertaking, because it wasn't his first attempt to revive a dilapidated stately home. Most famously he had done so at Aynhoe Park, a Jacobean stately home on the Northamptonshire-Oxfordshire border that he owned from 2006 to 2020 and turned into a lavishly decorated mecca for party-going A-listers.
But he hadn't anticipated the bureaucratic quagmire that Parnham would require him to wade through. 'We should have been finished by now. This auction was going to be our way of letting the world know we were open for business. But it's a grade I listed building' — in an area of outstanding natural beauty — 'and every little thing needs to be signed off. It's driving me mad. I think there are some people who just don't want us to succeed.'
Perkins's collection includes 4,500 plaster casts and 2,000 wooden moulds
Six years on, and eight years on from the fire, most of the house still doesn't have a roof. 'It really shouldn't take eight years to decide that this is an emergency,' Perkins says with a sigh. But regulations are regulations and, in the meantime, 'the house is getting worse'. Funds generated by the auction are now needed just to keep the restoration going.
Perhaps this seems a slightly haphazard way to finance what is already a precarious project. ('I just hope we can get the next planning application approved before the south elevation is lost for ever,' Perkins mutters.) But here, too, he is on familiar ground. In January 2021 he raised £4.1 million by auctioning off all the wonders he'd assembled at Aynhoe, so he reckons he knows what he's doing this time.
In any case he has never been one for the safe, predictable route. He has just turned 56, and the nearest he's had to a proper job was a paper round when he was 12. Even then he preferred wheeling and dealing. He used to bid for furniture at auctions on behalf of his mother, a Cheltenham-based antiques dealer: 'I got a lot of bargains. People were embarrassed to bid against me.'
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It's like being lost in a forgotten store room at the Natural History Museum
Then he started organising parties. He made a £30 profit on his own 18th birthday bash, after borrowing a suit from his father (who worked for the security services), hiring a nightclub and charging guests for entry.
Then came the raves, originally in fields around Cheltenham but soon, before he was out of his teens, across the UK. He had no obvious qualifications, and no capital beyond what he could raise by buying and selling the occasional antique. But he had the necessary chutzpah and can-do attitude, and he had caught the mood of the moment.
Rave culture was taking off, with help from the Conservative government's heavy-handed hostility, and there was an eager market for a promoter who could not only sell tickets for all-night parties but reliably make them happen. Perkins stood out from the crowd because he spent more on production —lights, stages, staff, stunts — than on DJs, and, perhaps as a result, became known for events that didn't just evaporate while the revellers were still trying to track them down.
Parkins thinks of Parnham as 'a living testament to the intersection of history, creativity and innovation'
There were ups and downs. An attempted 'summer festival' event in Cheltenham in 1989 left him £27,000 in debt — which led to him being bailed out by a rave-goer who became a business partner —while an early event in Oxfordshire was soured when gun-toting security guards demanded the night's takings. But Perkins was learning lessons about project management that still seem relevant today. 'It's having a master plan, having a vision, and then having the discipline to work through all the challenges and see it through.'
In 1991 his company Fantazia staged its first official event, described as '12 hours of musical delight in 10,000 square feet of unique visual madness' at the Eclipse in Coventry, the UK's first legal all-night club. It was a triumph, and the business never looked back. Fantazia's selling point was simple — its raves were legal, which meant that, unlike many, they actually happened. Perkins became adept at jumping through countless regulatory hoops, and Fantazia became a trusted and lucrative brand.
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James Perkins
By the mid-1990s the business was turning over several million pounds a year, and Perkins, still in his early twenties, had developed a taste for the big time, especially after staging the UK's biggest legal rave to date, One Step Beyond, at Castle Donington, in July 1992. The business branched out into merchandise, compilation CDs and videos, which proved equally successful. The video of Fantazia's Big Bang event at Glasgow's SECC Centre reached No 2 in the charts in 1994 — and Perkins realised that he was not so much a music entrepreneur as a music tycoon.
There were still plenty of seat-of-the-pants moments. For that Castle Donington event, lengthy legal wrangling over an entertainment licence — which was settled in Fantazia's favour on appeal — left them with only two and a half weeks to sell the 28,000 tickets. But they came through, just as Perkins eventually came through a long-running dispute with HMRC — settled out of court in 1995 — about £420,000 of allegedly unpaid VAT.
Perkins collection is 'a cacophony of curiosities and eccentricities'
Meanwhile he explored less stressful ways of investing his fast-growing wealth — and began to buy residential property, initially in up-and-coming Notting Hill. When this went well, he started buying listed buildings: Gosfield Hall in Essex, the Cerney Wick Roundhouse in Wiltshire, Dowdeswell Court in Gloucestershire. Each was lavishly restored, then sold on. This was also his intention in 2006 when he bought Aynhoe Park, a 28-bed Palladian mansion with 250 acres of parkland whose previous owner, the Country Houses Association, had gone into administration.
That plan went off course, because Perkins and his wife-to-be, Sophie, fell in love with the place. So they did it up, filled it with exotica from Perkins's already rampant collecting habit, and made it into a place where what used to be Cool Britannia went to let its hair down. Noel Gallagher had his 50th birthday party there. Jade Jagger got married there (as did he and Sophie, eventually). Other guests included Kate Moss, Bono, Bob Geldof, Helena Christensen, Damon Albarn, Damien Hirst, Anthony Joshua, Poppy Delevingne — and those are just names that have slipped out.
Aynhoe's reputation owed as much to its ambience as its clientele, however. Perkins left nothing to chance when it came making every visit smooth and luxurious. Comfort, efficiency and discretion were guaranteed, and his clientele made it worth his while. He also embellished the grand traditional interiors of Thomas Archer and John Soane with exotic objects of his own choosing, much as he has since done at Parnham. There were statues and plaster casts everywhere, a triceratops skull, a dodo skeleton and any number of stuffed animals, including several unicorns and a stuffed giraffe that floated in the air, suspended from helium balloons. The exuberant mash-up of styles and periods made the perfect rakish backdrop for sophisticated and extravagant parties.
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Parnham Park is a grade I listed building in an area of outstanding natural beauty
Perkins had a bit of a clear-out in 2012, auctioning off £3.2 million of stuff at Christie's, but Aynhoe was once again packed with treasures when the Perkins family (now including three children) finally said goodbye to the house in 2020. Hence that second auction — with Dreweatts this time — in 2021.
And now, with more urgency than he would have liked, Perkins is doing it all again, at Parnham Park. It's a slightly smaller sell-off than the previous two, but the cash injection could prove crucial for a bogged-down restoration project that might otherwise be at risk of going a bit HS2. 'Without a doubt this is one of the biggest challenges I've taken on,' he says. 'I hope we don't get prevented from seeing it through.'
Meanwhile, he says, he is happy with his lot. 'I can't imagine being anywhere else. I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything. This is what I'm good at.' His appetite for all-night parties isn't what it was — 'I'd rather just have a long lunch' — but he's more excited than ever by the idea of creating a 'sanctuary of beauty' where others can have a good time. 'You never cease to meet new, interesting people when you do this. And it's such a magical spot.'
He thinks of Parnham as 'a living testament to the intersection of history, creativity and innovation'. He just needs to complete the restoration and then — the fun bit — restock it with treasures.
He knows that some would consider his eclectic tastes inappropriate for such a profoundly traditional setting. But, he insists, 'I'm following in the footsteps of many other stately homeowners. I know that when you visit a National Trust property it's a time capsule. But that's not what most owners would have done. You'd inherit, and you'd want to fill the house with the latest things — tomorrow's antiques — not just sit among granny's furniture.'
In the old days, he argues, in the 17th, 18th and early 19th centuries, young aristocrats would devote years to 'the Grand Tour' — travelling around Europe assimilating and accumulating culture before coming home to fill their stately homes with newly acquired treasures. Hence the title of the forthcoming auction: Parnham Park: A Modern Grand Tour.
'I originally wanted to call it a Wunderkammer — a chamber of curiosities — because that's what it is. But nobody knows what that means. And in any case Modern Grand Tour' — which is also the name of his furniture line — 'says it better.'
He sighs contentedly. 'It's about living your own life, not just seeing the world through your ancestors' eyes.' And that is something that James Perkins has always done.