A Collector Who Sells – and Lives With – the Things She Loves

If her mother passed down a love of objects, Abbott has made it unmistakably her own. “I suppose my style is embodied in the hand chair,” she says. “It’s a little bit silly, a bit surreal, but it’s also incredibly well made. I love that it seems to belong to no particular place or time – it was made in the 60s, but it could be much older, and there’s something almost Mexican or Spanish about it.” Its beautifully darkened wood bears the marks of decades of use, only deepening its appeal for Abbott. “I’m really interested in this move towards people valuing older objects that have been loved, cared for and used,” she says. “I love pieces that make you look twice – objects that are playful but crafted with real seriousness.”

The same instinct is what drew her to the place she calls home: a single-level, two-bedroom flat in a modernist block full of quirks and contradictions. “It’s got most of the original features, which drives plumbers mad, and nothing really works well,” she laughs. “My girlfriend, [Polly], is a very functional person and this flat is the opposite of her personality.” Yet it is precisely those peculiarities that won Abbott over. To reach the front door, you climb three flights of stairs, despite there being no neighbours above or below, while the terrace feels remarkably secluded for such a dense part of London. “It feels like a private pod,” she says. And she loved how bright and airy the space is – so flooded with natural light, that she resisted her instinct to introduce colour throughout the flat. “It felt right to keep it painted white, exactly how I bought it,” she explains.

It’s with this blank canvas that Abbott got to work furnishing the space, spending two weeks “laser focused” on sourcing furniture from antique markets, and nearly breaking her back getting it all up the stairs. But if it was an effort to deck the place out, it’s also a process that got under her skin: last summer she launched Nica Hoop, a vintage furniture and object shop through which she sources and sells pieces with the same amount of character she likes to live with. “I’m a very impulsive person,” she says, “so when I thought about doing it on holiday last summer, I just thought, ‘fuck it, I’m just gonna set it up.’”

Looking back, though, she sees how she’s been slowly cultivating a taste throughout her life, starting with her mum’s influence but also through an art history degree, working as an editor for a travel magazine, writing about design and, more recently, working with an art start-up in New York. “I’ve always been interested in objects and design, so without realising it, I have been developing an eye my whole life. When I started sifting through markets and auctions, it came quite naturally to me,” she says.

Now that it’s a job rather than a hobby, Abbott has been able to spend more time learning, reading books and researching pieces online, a process that has only sharpened her eye further. More often than not, though, she allows herself to be drawn by her instincts. “I’m always looking for imperfection: anything that shows it was made by a human. Not to sound totally absurd, but pieces with a real history just have a feeling about them,” she says.

Using her flat as both storage unit and photo studio against which she captures the pieces for her website and Instagram feed, means Abbott has had to set a rule that anything bought for Nica Hoop she has to be happy to keep, a mantra that is currently being tested with six large chairs occupying most of the spare bedroom – “they’re mad and covered in velvet. I’m too scared to try and sell them because I don’t think anyone is going to buy them,” she says, laughing.