Contemporary design: David Linley will be exhibiting at this year's Grosvenor House Art & Antiques Fair for the first time. He gives Michael Hall an exclusive preview of the highlight of his stand: the Mozart Bureau

Apollo, June, 2006 by Michael Hall

When it was announced that David Linley would be taking a stand at this year's Grosvenor House Art & Antiques Fair there was widespread surprise among dealers around the world that London's most venerable fair was 'going contemporary'. Yet, like all art fairs, Grosvenor House wants to attract younger collectors, and its rather dowager-like image as the last bastion of 'brown furniture', Georgian silver and English porcelain--albeit of the very highest quality--was in need of some gentle revision. This could hardly have been done in a more sensitive way than by inviting David Linley to show some of the furniture that has made him a household name.

The centrepiece of Linley's stand will be a virtuoso one-off piece of the sort that has been a highlight of his firm's output in the past few years. 'We wanted to give people something extraordinary for our first Grosvenor House', he told me. 'Since this year is the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth, we've decided to create a bureau to celebrate the composer, who was a neighbour of ours.' This refers to the fact that when Mozart lived in London in 1764-65 his father took a house for the eight-year-old prodigy at what is now 180 Ebury Street, close to Linley's shop in Pimlico Road. The visit is commemorated not only by a blue plaque on the house but also by a statue of the young composer (unveiled 10 years ago by Linley's mother, Princess Margaret). 'And of course I love Mozart', Linley adds, 'and associate him with some of the most poignant moments of my life'.

The bureau's form evokes furniture from Mozart's time. A particular inspiration was a furniture maker for whom Linley feels a special affinity, David Roentgen (1743-1807), with whom he shares the characteristics of a recognisable neoclassical 'house style', great refinement of technique and a love of mechanical ingenuity. When the design of the Mozart bureau was being worked on, Linley recalled the famous Apollo roll-top desk in the Hermitage, made by Roentgen for Catherine the Great in 1783, which incorporates a mechanical organ. 'I asked myself if Roentgen were alive today how he would have sprung a musical surprise, so what we've done is include a musical box containing an iPod with Mozart's music on it.'

Linley has had great fun devising the bureau's iconography, designed in part to show off the virtuoso marquetry for which his firm is famous. He was helped by two musical friends, Noel Annesley of Christie's and his wife, Caroline. The exterior of the fold-down desk surface depicts Salzburg, and musical instruments are featured on the door fronts: a violin, flute, natural horn and basset horn. These latter are especially appropriate: when Mozart was living in Ebury Street he wrote his first symphonies (probably K16 and K19) and his sister, Maria Anna, who transcribed them for him, famously reminded him 'to give the horn something worthwhile to do'. A compartment above the central drawers depicts in marquetry the masonic 'all-seeing eye', recalling The Magic Flute, and its back panel shows Mozart at the piano, copied from the celebrated unfinished portrait by his brother-in-law Joseph Lange.

The bureau will be on sale for 95,000 [pounds sterling]. Any potential purchaser may be encouraged to move quickly by the news that Linley is not planning any more one-off pieces of this kind. 'They're time-consuming, and tend to give the impression that we produce only very expensive furniture, which isn't the case at all', he says, 'so this may be a last hurrah!'