Will Fisher, founder of Jamb: ‘Everyone has something they’re inexplicably drawn to — for me it was chimneypieces’
How a burning passion for English country-house style, nurtured from childhood, propelled the London-based dealer to create one of Britain’s most influential antique and reproduction furniture businesses
Jamb’s first major interior design project was Aldourie Castle in Scotland: ‘We did all the furniture, objects, carpets and fabrics completely from scratch,’ says Fisher. Above the chimneypiece in the Drawing Room is a Regency giltwood mirror by Thomas Fentham. The two Hardwicke sofas by Jamb were reproduced from a George III original. Photo: Christopher Horwood
In 1977, when he was 10 years old, Will Fisher wrote a letter to Bill Brooks, then chairman of Christie’s South Kensington, asking for a job.
‘He replied and invited me to lunch with the board of directors,’ recalls Fisher. ‘I had a tour, and there is a photograph somewhere of me at the rostrum with a gavel. At the end, he said, “If you still have this burning passion when you’re 16, give me a call.”’
Fast-forward to 2025, and Fisher, together with his wife, Charlotte Freemantle, is the proprietor of Jamb, one of Britain’s most influential antique and reproduction furniture and lighting businesses. He is part dealer, part designer and part frontman — and best known for his obsession with fireplaces.
His aesthetic is, in his own words, ‘definitely from the church of the English country house, but equally fascinated with movements like Art Deco, and the beginning of the machine age’.
Will Fisher at Jamb’s premises on Pimlico Road in London. Behind him is an Isola stone chimneypiece by Jamb, which features an acanthus-leaf frieze. The 19th-century bust of a bearded scholar on the console is available from Hawker Antiques. Photo: Simon Upton
‘It’s about incorporating classical language in a modern way,’ he adds. ‘It’s about surface, authenticity and craftsmanship.’
It’s also a look so coveted that the couple have recently taken up interior design, beginning in 2023 with the complete overhaul of a 300-year-old Baronial castle on the shores of Loch Ness in Scotland. ‘Talk about a baptism of fire,’ Fisher says. ‘It’s got 12 bedrooms alone, and just as many bathrooms. Aside from a collection of paintings associated with the ancestry of the house, we did all the furniture, objects, carpets and fabrics completely from scratch.’
But looking back, what was it that possessed him to want to work with antiques at such a young age?
‘I first remember visiting Ranger’s House in south London and Ragley Hall in Warwickshire with my parents. Those houses captured my imagination,’ he replies. ‘Then one day at school, a new, fascinating child turned up. His stepfather was an extraordinary man and a legendary dealer, called Warner Dailey. They lived in the most magical of houses, the Old Knoll in Blackheath, which was awash with eccentricities — country-house furniture, arms and armour, taxidermy. It was like a time capsule.’
The drawing room in the London house of Will Fisher and Charlotte Freemantle contains objects brought back from the couple’s travels, such as Renaissance vases, 18th-century pictures and fragments of ancient sculptures. The Portland stone chimneypiece dates from the mid-18th century and the Ziegler carpet from the early 1800s. Photo: Simon Upton
Fisher started ‘running’ with Dailey in the summer holidays. ‘He’d load up the car, then we’d spend the day travelling around Bond Street, Pimlico Road, Kensington Church Street, buying and selling,’ he recalls. ‘The market had this amazing liquidity and pace and vibrancy, and runners were like the arteries of the trade, going from shop to shop, moving things around.’
When Fisher turned 16, he took up Brooks’s offer and began working in Christie’s warehouse. One of his first colleagues was Ed Dolman, who 27 years later, in 2010, would rise to become chairman of the company’s board.
After a year studying history of art at Manchester University, Fisher returned to London and began driving forklift trucks at an antiques warehouse, where he was eventually given a corner from which he could buy and sell. ‘I had a commercial advantage,’ he says. ‘Because I was the man with the forklift, I was the first to see inside every delivery. I borrowed £500 from my then-girlfriend’s father and slowly grew from there.’
A Grand Lattice Globe in gilt brass and bronze by Jamb, photographed in the Palladian entrance hall of Wentworth Woodhouse, a country house in South Yorkshire. Photo: Simon Upton
In 2001, after another dealer serendipitously dropped out, Fisher was offered a space within a collective called Core One, located just off the King’s Road in Chelsea. It was here, at his first proper premises, that he began experimenting with making facsimiles of antique fireplaces, after realising that once a particularly beautiful specimen had sold it might never cross his path again. ‘The trade was changing, and there were a lot of gifted makers around, so I started to create things,’ he explains.
‘Everyone has something they’re inexplicably drawn to, and for me it was chimneypieces. I love the materials and their architectural nature, which has its own unique vernacular. And there is something primeval about fire, and the way people gather around it. They just ignite something within me — no pun intended.’
Fisher partnered with a foundry in Asia, as well as a workshop in England, and began making superlative copies of antique fireplaces, as well as lights and furniture, at a time when, he says, ‘reproduction’ was a dirty word. ‘No one had really done this before, but we wanted to make extraordinary things at an amazing level — things with integrity that fitted in seamlessly with the style of super-dry, super-untouched English country-house furniture that we were dealing in.
‘We never thought, “What do people want?” or “This is what the market needs.” It was much more organic. We just hoped there was an audience.’
A unique 18th-century Palladian chimneypiece in parcel-gilt and Portoro Nero marble at Jamb’s Pimlico Road showroom. Photo: Christopher Horwood
As it turned out, Fisher’s intuition served him well. By 2006, aided by the business and creative instinct of Freemantle — whom he’d met at a dinner in New York — he’d established Jamb, with its own premises on Pimlico Road.
Today, the company has moved to a double-fronted store a few doors down. It also has four showrooms in the US, and occupies a 24,000-square-foot former tank factory in south London, which houses showrooms, offices and workshops where fabricators chisel stone, polish marble and hand-patinate over 300 lighting designs. Crucially, there are also rows and rows of shelves lined with crates and pallets that contain thousands of objects and artefacts, seemingly stretching as far as the eye can see.
Storage has been a constant issue for the couple, who quickly outgrew the shipping container they initially used. The Jamb website currently lists about 300 different fireplaces for sale, and roughly the same number of lights and pieces of furniture. Then there are some 250 objects listed on the sister site, Hawker Antiques. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg, says Fisher, who admits that ‘acquiring’ is his favourite part of the job.
A colza-oil chandelier by Messenger and Sons hangs in the Great Hall at Aldourie Castle on the shores of Loch Ness, where pieces by Jamb include the Upton sofa in the foreground and the Crawford sofa behind, both reproductions of 19th-century originals. Photo: Christopher Horwood
What makes all this even more extraordinary is the fact that nearly everything has been amassed in just over a decade, after Fisher had a near-complete clear-out in 2012 for a single-owner sale at Christie’s, which included more than 400 lots. These ranged from a Chinese armchair to a hippopotamus skull and a taxidermy chihuahua, with the top lot, a Palladian chimneypiece, realising £181,250.
‘We really committed and put things in that we’d had for years,’ he says. ‘It was nerve-racking. We put everything on the line and stood to lose hundreds of thousands of pounds that day. Blood, sweat and tears went into that collection — I'd had some things since I was 12 years old. There were a couple of things I would kill for now.’
Fortunately, the sale was a phenomenal success, raising just shy of £4 million.
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‘I meet some very wealthy people who say, “I wish I hadn’t been a hedge-fund manager and that I’d been an antiques dealer instead,”’ Fisher observes. ‘What I say to them is: “Are you mad? I wish I’d been a hedge-fund manager. If I were, then I wouldn’t have to sell any of my things.”’
A showcase of decorative arts from distinguished private houses and estates, Collections is offered online until 15 April 2025. Collections: Including the Orange Blossom Collection and Works from ‘Centuries of Taste’ is on view until 3 April in New York; Collections: Property from the Viscount Wimborne and the Earl of Suffolk and Berkshire, 4-9 April in London; and Collections: Entre Orient et Occident au XVIIIe siècle, regard d’un amateur éclairé & Souvenirs des princes Murat, 12-15 April in Paris