A New, Eclectic Life for Lucian Freud’s Former Studio

WSJ | MAGAZINE
By Sarah Medford

Poetic License: Katz in a crawl space, reenacting Lucian Frued's painting "Girl Sitting in the Attic Doorway." (Right, from top: A corner of the sitting room; one of Frued's cabinets, topped with contemporary ceramics.

For the past 20 years, Robin Katz has been trying and failing to leave west London. From the balcony of his apartment in Holland Park, he can spot the curtained windows of the garden flat where he used to live—not far from his former place on Portobello Road, or another in Bayswater, or the house where he grew up just down the street. This is the apartment where Katz now lives.... Today the two-bedroom flat is crowded with earth-toned furnishings, well-used guitars and art spanning the centuries, from Roman column fragments to a pair of light sculptures holding electrified dandelion seed pods by the Dutch design collective Drift. [More]

• "It's a family tradition to look at everything"
• "My dad always told me that if I wanted to acquire knowledge in art, I should know a lot about one subject and a little about absolutely everything else."
• Since the opening of his business in 2005, Katz has chosen to zero in on 20th-century British painting.