THE 4,000-SQUARE-FOOT Victorian where Watson lives with his wife, the 41-year-old artist Christine Lebeck Watson, and their two children, Matilda and Hugo, was built in the early 1860s. Many of the surrounding buildings were built earlier that century, in the Regency period, and some are even older than that: Their home is near a small lane off Monkstown Road, the city’s primary artery; directly across that thoroughfare is Montpelier Parade, a short row of Georgian houses that is one of the earliest terraces of that era in south Dublin. Just over 200 years ago, Monkstown was largely open countryside, with an occasional mansion. Soon after, it became a seaside village that Queen Victoria loved to visit during her reign. The Watson house was built by and for the Dockrell family, prominent Protestants whose ownership of building-supply shops made them a force in the construction of Victorian Dublin.

In keeping with its royal association, the streets between Monkstown Road and the coast are named after those in London’s Belgravia: The Watson house is on Eaton Square; Belgrave Square is next to it. But these calm and cozy garden plots resemble their namesakes in title only — five minutes’ walk away is not Hyde Park nor Buckingham Palace but the edge of the Irish Sea; a 15-minute drive will take you into the verdant Wicklow Mountains, inhabited since Neolithic times and now a national park. It is a genteel area that is in all directions close to nature and seems undecided as to whether it would rather be tame or wild.

This Victorian is where Watson has gathered his collection of objects. Whenever he goes somewhere for work, be it India or Egypt, he wanders into an antiques shop and asks, “Can you ship that to Dublin?” And this house is more densely packed, he says, than the one the family moved from in Brooklyn Heights. That’s hard to imagine, yet the interior feels more curated than crowded: In the downstairs living room, there’s a Shang dynasty bronze horse that was found in Shanghai, a 20th-century pencil portrait found on the Sicilian island of Filicudi, a textured terra-cotta cup from 300 B.C. found in Wuhan, China, and an 18th-century 3-by-5-foot oil painting Watson describes with faux grandeur as a “Raphael,” which he bought two decades ago in Rome. A dinosaurlike bone in the dining room that almost reaches Watson’s shoulder leans against a corner and is given no provenance other than a joke: “I had a hip transplant seven years ago — you should see the scar.” It’s actually a contemporary sculpture from 1997, “Untitled (Femur),” by the New York-based Israeli artist Michelle Segre. Scattered among these pieces are delicate works made by the couple — his small graphic paintings, inspired by 21st-century Belgian artists like Luc Tuymans and Michaël Borremans; one of her pale cyanotype photograms of a length of string.