Issue link: http://papercitymagazine.uberflip.com/i/520425
BY REBECCA SHERMAN. ART DIRECTION MICHELLE AVIÑA. PHOTOGRAPHY CASEY DUNN AND JENNY ANTILL CLIFTON. THE ART- AND OBJECT-FILLED HOME OF DAVID LACKEY AND RUSSELL PRINCE "I think nothing of letting objects flow past me, but David wants to reach out and keep," says Russell Prince of his partner in business and life, David Lackey. Both are artists and antiquarians, but the two couldn't be more divergent in how they relate to the stuff of their lives — collections, furniture, art, even trash. Prince is a self- avowed minimalist who arrived at Lackey's Montrose- area townhouse in 2000 "with practically nothing, just my clothes and my art," he says. "All through my adult life, I've not liked having a lot of possessions. I moved around every year or two, and I'd only move with what I could fit into my car." Lackey, proprietor of the highly regarded David Lackey Antiques & Art at Antiques of River Oaks (where Prince has worked since 1998), is a longtime appraiser on Antiques Roadshow. He likes a lot of things around. At home, it's all about his many diverse collections — and there are hundreds. "Right now, I'm more interested in aesthetic collections, such as objects that depict hands or feet," he says. In fact, you can see something with a hands or feet motif in almost every room in the house. "I'm also very attracted to round objects, spheres, globes, and I spread them out all over. I started collecting years ago certain shapes of vases that are globular at the bottom, with skinny necks. It's not about how old it is; it's about the glaze, the color, the shape. That's more interesting to me at this point." So, how does a man who "needs a sense of space," as Prince describes himself, coexist with a confirmed collector such as Lackey? He bides his time. "You don't just move into someone's house and start making big changes," Prince says. "Within the first couple of years, David let me do the loft, which is now my bedroom. Then, I changed the wall colors in the house. Five years in, I started editing quite a bit. David likes really fine English furniture, but that's never been my cup of tea." The two have a joke between them to signal when something's too important to give up. "David will say, 'That's going to the rest home with me,'" says Prince, who cops to only one item that he would take with him: a Nakashima coffee table purchased at a Sotheby's auction of Andy Warhol's Curiouser and David Lackey and Russell Prince in the courtyard of their Montrose-area townhouses.