HOMES OF FORMER EXPATRIATES across the globe are decorated with Asian artefacts and mementos. It's refreshing, however, to come across a collection that is more than a mish-mash of ubiquitous elmwood cupboards and Buddha heads.
Despite bursting with exquisite furniture and decorative items, the London house of fine-art photographer Tim Hall and gilder and decorator Natasha Durlacher is a family home where art must vie with domesticity - books belonging to the couple's two daughters, Lillie, six, and Maya Rose, 18 months, jostle for surface space with Han dynasty ceramic horses. Dressing-up clothes can obscure piles of canvases for days. Hall and Durlacher often talk of setting up a gallery just to clear the decks, but the chaos embodies the home's character and adds to its charm.
Their Victorian terrace house bears the stamp of its owners' combined 16 years of living and working in Asia. From their base in Hong Kong, Hall and Durlacher travelled constantly and became insatiable collectors with a well-honed sense of what worked. They rummaged endlessly in Macau ('It's all changed now,' says Durlacher), scoured warehouses on the mainland and ploughed street markets from Vientiane to Bagan.
Durlacher was one of the first foreign dealers to switch onto contemporary Vietnamese art in 1993. After art school in Paris, where she was intimidated by the city's formal galleries, she found it liberating to discover wonderful paintings in Hanoi alleyways, where, then at least, commerce was secondary to artistic expression. 'I spent hours perching on stools, drinking coffee and swapping stories,' she says. Now her home - which doubles as her gallery - is hung with the reed-thin figures of Dinh Quan, the naive images of Le Thiet Cuong and the wistful motherhood oils of Nguyen Thanh Binh. Durlacher also sells home accessories she designed or sourced in Vietnam.
Despite having left five years ago, Hall remains a recognised name in Hong Kong. A new exhibition - a retrospective of his best work as well as his latest pictures from India - opened in Central on March 27, and his portraits of Burmese, Vietnamese and Hong Kong people hang in homes and restaurants across the territory. They are striking in their 'portable studio' style. With his hero, Richard Avedon, always in mind, Hall is reputed for his clean, expressive portraits shot against a white canvas backdrop that has travelled with him for thousands of kilometres.