LONDON — Collectors from around the world are polishing their pallets for what is set to be the art, antiques — and curiosities — auction of the year when Robert Kime’s eclectic, millennia-spanning collection goes under the hammer at Dreweatts starting Wednesday.

“Robert Kime: The Personal Collection” offers antique textiles, furniture, paintings and objects which the late interior designer gathered over the course of 30 years during his travels around the U.K., Europe and the Middle East.

A passionate, compulsive collector, he used his haul to decorate his homes over the years. The three-day sale is showcasing objects from Kime’s most recent residences, a vast flat in London’s Warwick Square and a house, La Gonette, in Provence.

Kime, who died last year at age 76, was King Charles’ favorite decorator, the man who designed the interiors at Highgrove, the monarch’s country estate in Gloucestershire, England, and at Clarence House in London’s St. James’s, where Charles and Camilla have lived for the past 20 years.

King Charles wrote the foreword to Kime’s eponymous 2015 book, describing the designer as a “maker of places and spaces, of rooms, corners and corridors that are, in turn, welcoming, interesting and, above all, comforting.”

Kime, whose other clients included Daphne Guinness and the late Duke of Beaufort, honed his aesthetic over a lifetime, exploring the world with the eyes of an historian and archaeologist, and the heart of an artist. He began collecting objects at the age of five, and was selling antiques to professors while studying medieval history as an Oxford undergraduate.

He treated his travels as one big Grand Tour, spying and buying all sorts of objects, some valuable, others not so much. Once back home, he’d surround himself with the artifacts — an Islamic tile; an ancient Athenian kylix; a silk embellished glove that belonged to King Charles I — and create worlds of comfort and color.

Kime would go on to design his own textiles based on meticulous historical research, open a shop on Ebury Street in London, and write numerous books detailing his passions and projects for clients.

Joe Robinson, head of house sales and private collections at Dreweatts, spent months working from Kime’s homes, examining and cataloguing items. He described the sale as “a distillment” of Kime’s life passions. They were objects he could not live without, and they’d move with him to various homes over the years.

“This is a collection of his favorite things, which could be anything from a painting by [Eric William] Ravilious with an estimate up to 150,000 pounds” to a bowl filled with fresh tomatoes, said Robinson during an interview ahead of the sale.

“This wasn’t a collection for somebody else. It was purely for him. I think people really appreciate that subtlety, and modesty, which is why he was so popular as a designer. And his aesthetic and concepts of decoration were so accessible,” Robinson added.

Kime believed each object he picked had a special power. “I don’t know how you describe romance, actually, but some objects have it, they just have something that is more than themselves. If you’re interested in them, you can communicate it, and they can communicate it too…and it’s just magic, it’s just how life is,” Kime once said.

Robinson added that Kime’s interiors were never fixed, and he would arrange and rearrange objects to be “in conversation” with one other. He’d cluster various works by members of the Bloomsbury Group, or gather objects together by theme or time period, regardless of their value, or rarity.

More than 750 lots ranging in value from 30 pounds to 100,000 pounds will go under the hammer over the three days, with the auction held at Dreweatts in Berkshire, England. The sale is expected to raise more than 1.5 million pounds, although it will likely be more, given the interest in the lots online.

Highlights include the Ravilious painting “New Year Snow,” and the Elizabethan-era “Portrait of a Man with a Pickaxe and a Spade in a Landscape,” the latter of which carries an estimate of 10,000 pounds to 15,000 pounds.

Dreweatts said both paintings were Kime family favorites and had hung in several of his homes over the years. Other paintings in the sale are by Walter Sickert, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant.

Among the many ancient pieces is an Egyptian wooden funerary boat with crew. It is painted and decorated and dates from circa 2133 to 1797 B.C. Its estimate ranges from 15,000 pounds to 20,000 pounds.

Textiles also play a starring role in the sale, with a series of 16^th century Ushak rugs with estimates of up to 60,000 pounds each.

One of the more unusual lots is a large, rare bezoar stone dating from the 16^th or 17^th century. Bezoar stones are like gallstones, calcified concretions of stone or hair, and are found in the stomachs of some animals.

They were introduced to Europe from the Middle East in the 11^th century, and were once believed to have curative properties that could counter poison. They were highly prized by royal courts and the nobility, and were worth far more than their weight in gold. Kime’s stone carries an estimate between 6,000 pounds and 10,000 pounds.

Kime’s daughter Hannah said her father’s treasures, including that precious gallstone, were as cherished as old friends.

“Whether an ancient vase that had spent 400 years on the ocean floor, or a plate of Provençal tomatoes, if it caught his eye, it was welcomed. Once within the fold, whether for a long or a short stay, it would be savored daily. His eye did not discriminate between ‘important’ or commonplace things, all were given a place if they spoke to him,” she said.

Hannah Kime added that a “dried seed pod would sit on an 18^th century side table, a child’s pottery creation would find its place on the mantlepiece, perfectly at home beside a Tang dynasty figure and a marble obelisk.

“Most importantly though, because each object was chosen entirely on its own terms and carried with it its own story, it never, ever grew tired. It could be endlessly reinvented by moving to a different location or by being placed with different companions,” she added.

The sale may end on Friday, but Kime’s aesthetic lives on.

Kime began designing his own fabrics in 1983, based on his extensive archive, sourcing of document pieces and extensive travel. The shop offers fabric, wallpaper, furniture, home accessories, antiques, rugs, and interior design services, all of them fit for a king, or a commoner.