In Michael Bond’s Paddington Bear series Mr Gruber is the bear’s best friend, offering a listening ear and sage advice from the sanctuary of his antiques shop on the Portobello Road in west London. As well as eating their elevenses, the pair would regularly head off on exciting trips.
The real-life Mr Gruber is Douglas Carter, the 66-year-old owner of Alice’s antiques shop, whose bright red shop was the setting for Gruber’s Antiques in the Paddington movies — but who is now sailing off, permanently, into the sunset.
When Alice’s and the two-storey maisonette above owned by his mother of the same name, 87, goes on the market today, will be a landmark moment for Portobello. It is one of only three antiques shops left on a twisting west London boulevard now dominated by expensive boutiques and upmarket coffee shops, but which used to be crammed with rag-and-bone stores run by rough-and-ready market traders.
The shop, which sits on the corner of Denbigh Close on the Notting Hill end of the street, was bought as a bric-a-brac store by Carter’s grandpa Minky in 1952, and has remained in the Carter family ever since.
The transformation of Portobello is something that both baffles and delights Carter, who watches a group of Spanish Paddington fans swarming around the entrance while being addressed by a guide as we chat on a warm spring day.
“It is bizarre,” Carter says, chuckling, standing on the balcony of the maisonette above the shop. “Four times every Saturday, we get a proper Paddington Bear tour where the guide’s got a Paddington mascot with him.”
Alice’s and the maisonette have featured in all three of the films, which has meant that the family have been paid a substantial sum (although he won’t say how much) by StudioCanal and Heyday Films, which jointly made them.
The outside of the shop was used for each of the movies, with the Alice’s sign replaced by a Gruber’s Antiques one, while the inside of the shop was forensically recreated at Elstree Studios so as to cause minimum disruption to the family and the street.
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“The detail they got was ridiculous,” he says. “For two days we had about three or four people come along and take photographs of the banister rails, the floorboards, the colour of the walls and everything like that. And then they just recreated it.”
Meanwhile, some of the scenes inside Mr Gruber’s home were filmed inside Alice’s bedroom. Actors and crew came and went for days. “We had Jim Broadbent looking out the window upstairs, out of my mother’s bedroom window — they took a day to shoot the scene. He was a gentleman. Mum made him a nice cup of tea and everything.”
The Paddington executives were far from the first movie moguls to take an interest in Alice’s. The most famous film to be shot there was The Italian Job, filmed in 1969, where Charlie Croker (Michael Caine) lived on Denbigh Close and drove past Alice’s shop in his Aston Martin in the film. Carter’s grandfather and father appeared in the background of the shop.
Walking around today, you see the extraordinary uniqueness of the maisonette, with the 2,000 sq ft space crammed with a mesmerising jumble of memorabilia and curiosities. Vintage advertisements for tobacco and signs for old railway stations jostle with antique pots in the kitchen; a wall-mounted grandfather clock sits in the dark red-painted hallway near a narrow winding staircase; and a coat of arms hangs above the living room doorway. The front door is painted with what appear to be fairytale characters.
Downstairs in the antiques shop itself, Edwardian-era bicycles dangle from the ceiling; freestanding globes sit on the floor; crowded together are a giant model of a medieval sailing ship, cherubs, ancient televisions, a dog of the year trophy — and a series of slightly ghoulish Victorian-era signs from Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum.
How on earth does the real-life Mr Gruber choose his antiques? “Taste,” Carter says, laughing. He adds that he has actually “got rid of a lot of stuff” in recent years as he responds to changing cultural norms. “I can’t buy anything big because everyone’s now got such small flats. They can’t buy large pieces of furniture anymore,” he says. Meanwhile wealthy overseas buyers find the cost of shipping prohibitive. “I used to have very wealthy American clients come to the shop and they didn’t really care how much it cost to get things home.”
Carter says he has chosen to sell Alice’s — both the shop and one-bedroom maisonette — as Alice, 87, is now in a nursing home and Carter, who lives in a different property nearby, is ready to retire. Owners can buy the freehold for the property for £4.5 million, with flexibility as to whether to make the whole of it a home, or keep part of it as a shop.
The dizzying asking price of the property, at the Notting Hill end of Portobello Road, illustrates the astonishing way the area has transformed in recent years. Carter says he has “no idea” how much his grandfather originally paid for it, but that the value of the property has exceeded inflation many times over.
So who on earth would buy the world’s most jumbled shop and a maisonette for £4.5 million? Jack Thomas, from Knight Frank’s Notting Hill office, is convinced that this will be catnip for Americans — who are flocking to London in growing numbers, and are crazy about both Notting Hill and the Paddington movies. “Notting Hill is where people want to be — it’s a very popular area with Americans and a lot of Europeans, too,” he says.
And what on earth will Carter — a beloved local who shouts constant greetings to his friends, neighbours and postman as we speak — do with himself once he has sold? In keeping with Mr Gruber, he wants to go somewhere exotic … in his case, not Peru, but Nicaragua.
“My son is building some sort of natural village there. I’ll probably go and see him for a while, and I haven’t seen my granddaughter yet,” he says. “But I’ll miss the atmosphere here. It’s an amazing village — unlike anywhere in London.”
£4.5 million, knightfrank.co.uk
