Reclusive exclusive

Connoisseurs: Stanley J Seeger, left, and his companion Christopher Cone at Greenway Manor in Devon

Tea, taken with the collector Stanley J Seeger and his companion of 30 years Christopher Cone, is poured from the “bachelor” silver teapot that belonged to Lord Nelson. The iconic status of the object hardly needs exegesis: Britain’s greatest hero, England’s national beverage, domination of the seas, tea bushes growing on the hillsides of an empire that could not have flourished without naval supremacy ... But perhaps you would prefer something stronger. If so, after a rattle of spirits and ice, it may emerge from Al Capone’s cocktail shaker: the history of Prohibition in a glass.

“Provenance is important,” smiles Seeger seraphically, white beard and long locks making him look like a cross between an Old Testament prophet and Robinson Crusoe. “This came from Capone’s butler, who bought it from the sale of Capone’s effects.” (It was a present from his gang, inscribed: “To a regular guy, from the boys”.)

At Greenway Manor, the couple’s country house in Devon, you have a choice of seating: Winston Churchill’s favourite armchair or Rudy Valentino’s sofa, reupholstered at a cost that makes even this Maecenas wince. Or you might prefer to lie down on Oliver Cromwell’s bed.

These are simply bonnes bouches from the grand feast of beauty and art, music and “things” that has been Seeger’s 80-year-long life. Its Proustian overtones could not have been predicted from his childhood, as the son of a polo-playing Milwaukee surgeon – whose wife inherited a fortune from lumber and petroleum – who made sure he was put on a horse before he could walk.

At Princeton, Seeger studied musical theory and he still composes music, as a private activity; there are two grand pianos in his London house, two in the country. The foundation he created at Princeton, however, is in Hellenic studies, reflecting his life-long love of Greece, where he lived for many years. His “compulsion” to collect – ordering, cataloguing, completing sequences – may be something to do with his German blood. “I’ll collect anything,” he confides cheerfully. “We’re romantics.”

Last month, Sotheby’s sold one of the fruits of Seeger’s connoisseurship (Cone used to work there, in the Victorian picture department), an Aladdin’s Cave of cookery books. Renaissance banquets, 17th-century confectionery, the regulations governing Bohemian pastry cooks, “ragoo”, eels – the whole of culinary life was there. Why cookery books? “Well, look at me,” laughs Cone, who is perhaps a trifle heavier than when I first knew him at Cambridge in the 1970s. He is himself a serious cook, although not as serious as Seeger: a perfectionist who’ll spend all afternoon making a cup of tea on scientific principles.

Collecting is another obsessive activity. Seeger will work at a collection until it has “fulfilled itself”. In 1993 he sold 88 Picassos in different media for $20m. His modern collection – Francis Bacon, Braques, Miró, Egon Schiele, Jasper Johns, three Picassos – fetched £45m in 2001. Was it painful to part with so many masterpieces? “It was a great relief not to have the responsibility. You have to keep the art in museum conditions, which is not easy all the time. You’re constantly being asked to lend” – requests that Seeger meets whenever possible, while finding it, for reasons of administration, “also a bore”. Once, the paramedic who came to attend to the housekeeper’s broken leg asked if he hadn’t recently seen the Francis Bacon triptych that used to hang in their London flat exhibited at the Tate Gallery. Books, unless very rare, are less demanding. But they do require shelves.

That may be why they buy country houses. In 1980, Seeger rescued Sutton Place, outside Guildford in Surrey, which had been left in a condition as miserable as its former owner, Jean Paul Getty of the Getty Oil Company. He chuckles at the thought of the portrait of the “reclusive Stanley Seeger” published by a tabloid newspaper; it showed the house manager. (The photograph that appears with this article is the first of him ever to have been published.) After six years, Sutton Place was sold to American collector Frederick Koch, who still owns it. Seeger moved on to Deanery Gardens in Sonning, Berkshire – something of a connoisseur’s house, having been built by Edwin Lutyens for Edward Hudson, founder of Country Life magazine, with a garden by Gertrude Jekyll.

In Barbados, Seeger built “a paradise house”, where “hummingbirds would fly in and out”. But they found the climate insufferable. They came across Greenway Manor, in Devon, in 2003, when Seeger was about to go into hospital for an operation. Buying it was therapy. “Some Queen Anne houses look as though they had landed from the sky; this looks as though it has grown out of the ground,” observes Cone.

With the advice of the conservation architect Ian Constantinides, the pair delicately unpicked the fabric of the “higgledy-piggledy” house (the corner of one room was supported by part of a four-poster bed). In places, the thatch was six feet deep. “Then,” says Seeger joyfully, “we had the fun of decorating the house.” Their purchases included a 13th-century walnut table, “hell for the removers”, the object being to create an atmosphere suggesting that the house had been continuously occupied for generations. Pride of place was given to an art deco rug that “looks marvellous on the flagstones”. Not wanting to “live with staff buzzing around us”, they bought a small farm to put up the workers.

“It’s not a movie star house, not a bling house at all.” More, as Cone puts it, a “farmhouse which has been to a very good university”. Seeger seems to have little idea how much Knight Frank are asking for the house (I can enlighten him: £5m), beyond knowing that “it’s nowhere near what we put into it”. They still love the house but at a distance, ill health having made it difficult to get down to Devon. Time to move on; another project has fulfilled its potential.

William Morrison at Knight Frank, tel: +44 (0)1392 848 823