We have visited the homes of three gallerists, and each one was memorable. The collector and gallerist Liu Tao lives amid palms, water, and gardens, in a house that prompts visitors to marvel that something so beautiful could be in Shanghai. Once low-ceilinged and dark, it was transformed by the designer Xie Ke; now the changing course of natural light seems to converse with the plants he tends himself. The artworks he has collected over many years also bring back, again and again, small memories of his time with artists.

Arthur de Villepin, the son of the former French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, founded a gallery with his father four years ago. He now lives in Hong Kong, in a home that feels distinctly Chinese: water from the living room, mountains from the bedroom. The works he keeps are all by artists to whom he feels especially connected, among them paintings by his old family friend Zao Wou-Ki, along with works by his mother and sister. In his view, collecting allows him to regain a measure of control over life.

Lang Lang, who is from Changchun, and Andrew, a Londoner who runs his family gallery, met and fell in love through art. The couple live in a century-old apartment that they have shaped through a dense interplay of artworks and antique furniture: Han-dynasty Chinese pottery figures, Indian miniature paintings, modern and contemporary paintings and installations by European, American, and Chinese artists. Works from different periods, on different themes and in different mediums, speak to one another throughout the home. As they put it, “Collecting may be vain in one sense, but people need vanity. You want to present the best side of yourself, inside and out, to others and to yourself.”

In 2021, the collector and gallerist Liu Tao decided to sell his apartment in central Shanghai and move to the city’s western outskirts, where he set about making a new home amid palms, water, and gardens. Visitors react the same way: it hardly seems like Shanghai. Liu left his native Chongqing to make his way on Wall Street alone, then later changed course and opened a gallery in Shanghai. Those experiences, across industries and countries, helped shape his singular ideas about art, collecting, and how to live.

All of that is visible in his home. The living room and study are open and expansive. Liu Tao lives with his cat in a single-floor apartment of two hundred and eighty square meters. The interior was originally somewhat dim: it is on the ground floor, with relatively low ceilings, and had been divided into several closed-off rooms, which made it feel oppressive. The layout has now been completely reworked. The plan was reduced from three bedrooms and three baths to two rooms: an open primary suite running east to west, and a small guest room. The living room, study, kitchen, and dining area are all connected, and from the sofa he can look directly at a wall of books, as he has always liked to do.

Many of the books have been with him since childhood and reflect the full range of his interests: art, architecture, plants. The windows were all opened up so that every part of the house has a view, and certain forms were introduced to let the plants enter in just the right way. Western light comes slanting into the room. “Xie Ke always designs with the body,” Liu Tao said, “by sensing how the light changes in a space over the course of a day. In the east, the morning sun rises slowly and washes the whole house in gold. In the west, it becomes a diagonal line, falling across a stool or a bottle.”

“At noon, you can see the light from both sides cross in the middle of the house. It’s marvelous.” The balcony of the new home has also been planted with the species he knew as a child, turning it into a second outdoor living room. There is also a garden outside the bedroom window. Liu Tao grew up on the campus of Southwest Agricultural University, where his parents and neighbors all taught in the horticulture department, and every house was surrounded by plants its residents had grown themselves. Gradually, he came to love them too; at one point, he even dreamed of becoming a botanist. After moving to Shanghai, he wanted to bring over the plants he had loved back then.

On the balcony are white champaca, gardenia, banana shrub, osmanthus, and all kinds of camellias, the sort of plants that are deeply familiar to people from Chongqing.

“My camellia has probably been with me for more than ten years. Ever since I moved to Shanghai, it has been on the balcony of every home I’ve had.” In the entry hall, the marble sculpture on the left is Triangle, by the Spanish artist Alberto Peral, from 2021; suspended from the ceiling is an installation by the French artist Odile Decq, from 2016; and the work on the wall is Gloom, a mixed-media piece by the young artist Qiu Lingui, from 2018. In the dining area, the painting on the wall is Extra, an oil on canvas by Eduardo Arranz-Bravo, from 2016; the bronze sculpture by the window is Long Arm Braçllarg, also by Eduardo Arranz-Bravo, from 1985; and on the right is a metal Ghost chair designed and made by the Dutch designer Dennis Slootweg in the 1960s. When Liu Tao was packing for last year’s move, he realized that he had collected more than four hundred works in all, including photographs, sculptures, installations, and oil paintings. A number of them are now displayed in the new home.

The dining room is a tribute to the Spanish artist Eduardo Arranz-Bravo. He studied under Miro, and Liu Tao recalled visiting his studio: “There was a skylight overhead, and starlight came in. We drank beneath it and talked about his paintings. I still remember it now.” The wall in the kitchen occupies one of the darker corners of the house. Hanging there is a photograph by Candida Höfer of the Salvation Army headquarters in Paris, and the window in the image seems to bring light into the room.

In the study there is also a Höfer photograph, Royal Archives, The Hague II, from 2003; Liu Tao even took a picture of himself in the same setting. He finds the artist interesting because she is so shy, and so photographs constructed public places such as theaters, libraries, and train stations, always in the absence of people. A triptych by Shen Chen, from 2007, hangs on the living-room wall. Painted by the Shanghai-born artist, who now lives in the United States, it marks the beginning of his gray-toned period and has a calm, resonant quality.

Behind the sofa is Huang Yuanqing’s 2020-4, from 2020, a relatively rare black-and-white work. He spent four years on it, and each time Liu Tao visited the studio he could see some slight change. At first it was only a piece of black cloth, with nothing on it; then lines slowly began to appear, growing more numerous, more intricate, and more mysterious. These are the “characters” he writes. On the balcony stands Needle AGUJA, a cast-iron sculpture by the Spanish artist Enrique Asensi, from 2023. Liu Tao first saw a much larger original on the Barcelona waterfront; afterward, the artist specially made a smaller one for him.

Liu Tao’s collection appears everywhere in the house. His work keeps him extremely busy; some weeks he travels to roughly ten cities. Home, then, becomes a kind of resting station.

“When I think that after a week I’ll be back home, and back to my papaya tree, I feel happy. For me, busyness and ease are both necessary, and there is no contradiction between them. The thing that allows me to relax is home.”

“When I was young, I always told myself that my future home should be like Paris, or like Shanghai. But after all the circling around, my home is really just myself. It isn’t Paris, or Shanghai, or Chongqing. It’s me.” Arthur de Villepin is the son of Dominique de Villepin, the former French Prime Minister. As a child, he followed his diplomat father around the world, living for long stretches in the United States, India, France, and Britain, and getting to know a number of major artists, among them Zao Wou-Ki, Kiefer, Soulages, and Myonghi Kang.

He settled in Hong Kong at twenty-two and has now lived there for more than ten years. Four years ago, he founded a gallery with his father, opening with a solo exhibition by Zao Wou-Ki, described as “Asia’s most expensive” artist. Zao and the family were intimate friends across generations; in his later years, he had dinner with them nearly every weekend. De Villepin’s home is in Hong Kong’s Southern District, a duplex with two sunny terraces, and from almost every angle it offers some view of nature: water from the living room, mountains from the bedroom.

“I feel especially ‘Chinese.’ Landscape gives me a quiet kind of strength.” The first thing he thought when renovating the apartment was that he wanted a tree, a piece of nature brought indoors. The olive tree is one of his favorites. Such trees can live for centuries, and for him it suggests contemplation and healing; it teaches you to slow down. It also brings back memories of time spent with his family in India and Italy, and of a film called Under the Olive Tree.

Everything in the home is organized around that tree: an olive-green sofa, a fifteenth-century long table, antique chairs from Brazil and France, a lamp from Morocco, a ceiling light designed by Isamu Noguchi, and contemporary artworks. De Villepin wanted to create, at home, an atmosphere in conversation with time.

“For me, the most important thing is to be surrounded by elements of nature. A home should strip away the unnecessary and let the necessary speak.” The artworks in the apartment were all made by artists to whom he feels particularly close. Behind the sofa hangs Zao Wou-Ki’s Les Poisson Marie-Laure, from 2004.

In the living room there is a fish-tank painting by Zao Wou-Ki, made when the artist was in his eighties. It is named after de Villepin’s mother and is called Marie-Laure’s Fish.

“Once, at a state banquet, my mother placed many little fish bowls filled with goldfish, because she wanted to pay tribute to China. Zao Wou-Ki loved them when he saw them. Later, he bought a huge fish tank for his studio. He was already in his eighties then, and he kept fish there every day, feeding them in the studio. It inspired him greatly, and he made a number of related works. This is one of them.” In the dining room, on the wall behind him, hangs Like Swimming, by Marie de Villepin, from 2022. It was a birthday gift from his sister.

In the painting, Marie creates an underwater world. The forms resemble coral beneath the sea, and as the natural light shifts, the coral seems to change color too. She works both with her fingers and with palette knives. Painting with her fingers gives the work a force that is rough and yet sensuous. Another work de Villepin treasures deeply is Alfred Wallis’s Two Sailing Boats and a Lugger.

Wallis was one of Britain’s earliest modern painters, though he was never a professional artist. He was poor, spent his life fishing, gathered bits of cardboard and other materials on the beach, and then went home to paint boats.

“Looking at those boats always reminds me that art is not always bound up with fame and capital.” In the dining room, Myonghi Kang’s Fleur de choux rouge, from 2020, almost perfectly merges with the view beyond the window. What we see outside is a raw tangle of hills and trees, not a carefully manicured garden. De Villepin’s father has been collecting Kang’s work for about twenty-five years. “In her paintings, you can almost see the wildness of nature, with no compromise at all.”

“She doesn’t want you to think it is beautiful. It is so primal that it is nearly aggressive,” de Villepin told us. “When I was young, I didn’t understand her paintings at all. I only felt that the brushstrokes were scattered everywhere, chaotic and disorderly. So I took one of her paintings with me to school in Britain, and then to Hong Kong.”

“It took me a long time to realize that what Myonghi wanted to express in her work was precisely the chaos of nature, that imperfection is perfection, and that I was the one who needed to make peace with perfectionism.” De Villepin likes the mixing of old and new. “If objects have been used before, then they have already had a life, and that vitality enters the house and becomes part of your own life.” He bought an old Japanese cabinet in damaged condition and repaired it himself.

It now holds a ceramic fragment by Zao Wou-Ki, whose moving lines match beautifully the naturally curling arc of the flowers beside it.

“You can see how this antique cabinet interacts with the lines of the staircase. They are all tiny details, but very beautiful.” In the bedroom hangs Untitled (Blue), from 2019, by Lawrence Carroll. Carroll punctured holes in the surface of his paintings.

De Villepin said of the work, “Most people see only the holes, but what I see is a painting that breathes, a painting with life.” To him, this is a little like Chinese architecture. Most Western bridges are straight, while Chinese bridges often bend and wind; it is another way of looking at life. On a table nearby is a sculpture by his mother, the sculptor Marie-Laure Viebel, titled The Moon Child.

The sculpture is full of intriguing small holes that call to mind the surface of the moon. Viebel opened two holes in the stone, giving the whole “moon face” its life. De Villepin considers himself deeply attached to home, and says that this may be close to the Chinese emphasis on family. The love and support of family give him the energy to do more. Everything he collects is closely tied to his own life and experience.

“The most important thing in collecting is that you collect for yourself. You can collect artists you might truly come to understand, talk with them, and understand their way of living. They will let you see things from a completely different angle.”

“Collecting can make you a better person. Through collecting art, you can regain control of your life.” Lang Lang, from Changchun, and Andrew, from London, met and fell in love at an art fair. Andrew runs his family’s gallery in Knightsbridge, and Lang Lang works in cross-cultural communication. They have now been married for eight years, and their boy-girl twins are named Aya and Maya, a playful echo of a Northeastern Chinese expression. Their home is in Kensington, in a pure-white mid-Victorian building, a duplex of more than one hundred and thirty square meters.

The original features of the historic building were preserved, with only the flooring and other basic infrastructure replaced. The entire background was left blank, so that it could receive all kinds of art. Though there are many works in the house, it does not feel like a museum; instead it is relaxed and very much lived in. Much of the furniture comes from Andrew’s parents’ collection. Andrew’s father, Andras Kalman, founded the venerable Crane Kalman Gallery in Britain, representing and showing many respected nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century masters, including L. S. Lowry, Hans Hofmann, Alexander Calder, and Francis Bacon.

“Growing up, our home was filled with modern art and antique furniture of every kind, so when I had a family of my own, this style came naturally. I never consciously designed it,” Andrew told us. The couple’s collection appears in every corner. The earliest works in the apartment are a group of nineteenth-century British naïve paintings; the newest is by the British artist Jethro Buck, made last year. The span is more than two hundred years.

The range of subjects and mediums is equally broad: African tribal art, Indian miniature painting, Han-dynasty Chinese pottery figures, and modern and contemporary paintings and installations by European, American, and Chinese artists. “What’s funny is that many of the Chinese and Asian works were actually bought by Andrew, while the European and American ones were bought by me,” Lang Lang said with a laugh. “Take Zhou Chunya’s Green Dog. He collected it more than twenty years ago. At the time, he didn’t even know who Zhou Chunya was; he bought it on instinct, and only later realized how famous the artist was.”

The family’s favorite space is the living room, which has a ceiling height of four and a half meters and three south-facing floor-to-ceiling windows, making it especially open and bright. Beneath a large oil painting by Jethro Buck, made with twenty-three-carat gold leaf, lies a tapestry work by the British modern artist William Scott, from 1980, one of twenty-five versions, used here as a carpet. Its image is a black frying pan accompanied by orange musical notes.

In Jethro Buck’s When I Am Among the Trees, from 2023, the artist uses the techniques of Indian miniature painting and hand-ground natural pigments to depict woodpeckers, flying squirrels, and woodland. “Children are especially drawn to those details. And the black and orange in the tapestry fit the mood of Halloween perfectly. Our whole family loves sitting on it to play games.” In a corner stands He An’s installation Able All the Pain and Sorrow Also Able Death, from 2014, which the couple acquired on a trip to China in 2014. Composed of deconstructed Chinese character components, it often brings Lang Lang, living far from home, a small sense of warmth, and it is also where she most likes to sit when working from home.

On the other side, above a nineteenth-century British antique loveseat, hangs Street Scene with Old Church Tower, from 1964, a late painting by L. S. Lowry, one of the most important British artists of the twentieth century. The work is the same age as Andrew, and his own artistic awakening began with a seascape by Lowry that hung in his parents’ living room.

“It wasn’t large. The white sky and the white sea almost merged into one another. It was mysterious, full of spirit. I would stare at it for a very long time, as if all my troubles had disappeared and I had ‘lost’ myself in the painting, even though I was only nine or ten.”

“I think one aspect of collecting art is that, living in a particular historical moment, you are always trying to find a coordinate for yourself, something that helps you understand who you are,” Lang Lang said. Upstairs, on the bedroom wall, hangs a floral painting: Six Mixed Dahlias, by Mary Newcomb, from 1973.

“We are both interested in artists without professional training. Mary Newcomb, for instance, studied natural science and taught science at Cambridge. Her work comes entirely out of a particularly genuine love of nature, and it makes it very easy for us to relax.” Beside the bed is an L. S. Lowry drawing from Andrew’s collection, Man in a Raincoat, from 1945, in a private collection, courtesy of Crane Kalman Gallery, London.

“The figure in the drawing looks very much like my late father. He lost his entire family in a Nazi concentration camp and arrived in Britain with nothing. But he endured with extraordinary toughness and did everything he could to survive. Every day I see this drawing, I think of him.” The most intimate work in the house is hidden in a corner of the bathroom: a small drawing of a bear by Jethro Buck, who studied Indian miniature painting with the master Ajay Sharmaa and counts King Charles III among his most important patrons. Andrew gave it to Lang Lang on their first wedding anniversary.

“This year, around the time of our anniversary, we donated it to a charity auction held by the Animals Asia Foundation at 5 Hertford Street in London. When the artist learned about it, he painted another little bear for us. We were deeply moved.” The artworks in the living room are often changed around or rehung, and each arrangement brings a different feeling. Andrew’s most recent acquisition is a nineteenth-century British painting of three little girls playing in a messy room, with toys scattered all over the floor.

“It immediately made me think of our home, and of my children.” For Andrew, every acquisition still carries a childlike thrill.

“That joy has nothing to do with a work’s monetary value, or whether it is by a famous artist. It lies in the vitality of the work itself, and whether it tells some story that has to do with me.”

“My way of choosing art is very simple: do I want to hang it in my home and live with it? If the answer is yes, that is enough. You choose with your eyes and your spirit, not for outside reasons, not to show off, and not to buy something only to put it away and venerate it. In fact, that makes collecting both harder and easier.” Unlike Andrew, Lang Lang did not grow up in a home filled with art, but her interest in it began quietly when she was young.

When she came to Britain for graduate school, she spent her free time wandering through museums and galleries. Later, she worked in cross-cultural communication for major arts institutions, including the V&A Museum in Britain and the West Bund Museum in Shanghai. She also decorates the house with the children according to the mood of different holidays. “I’m not quite like my husband, in that I don’t feel there is one work I simply cannot do without. What I love is the atmosphere as a whole, the environment. Perhaps part of it is vanity, but I think people do need vanity.”

“You want to present the best side of yourself, inside and out, to others and also to yourself.”

“I think artworks are the most important visual standard for reminding you, at every moment, of the good side of life. Through art, you can always feel those places where humanity, or civilization, gives off light.”