“If Gucci can sell a £600 handbag and make a profit, then so can we,” says Paul Sumner, the managing director of Sotheby’s new middle-market saleroom at Olympia in West London.
He was brought back from Australia to run the facility, which aims to tap into the lucrative market for antiques and works of art in the £500-£10,000 bracket, in direct competition with Christie’s successful mid-range saleroom in South Kensington.
Sotheby’s Olympia is housed on the second floor of a vast and charmless exhibition complex, which houses everything from software shows to the three established Fine Art and Antiques Fairs, in Hammersmith, a district just on the wrong side of the tracks of the moneyed Kensington and Notting Hill areas.
A number of Sotheby’s Bond Street departments have been fully moved to the 55,000-square-foot premises, which have been decorated in a modern, clean style reminiscent of a Terence Conran restaurant. Other departments have been split, with the high-end remaining in Bond Street. Twenty to 30 sales per year from Bond Stree will now be held in Olympia, and another 40 will be added. The firm hopes to achieve turnover of $50 million. Commission, both buyer’s and seller’s, will be a little lower at Olympia; the catalogues are sold for a flat £5 and are more portable, and the saleroom will be open all weekend. The café and restaurant and instant appraisals service are also user friendly.
“We are able to cut costs considerably, for example the rabbit warren of Bond Street means each piece is handled up to 16 times, whereas here, with more logical delivery, storage and photography facilities, they are only handled seven times. It’s cheaper and safer for the pieces,” notes Mr Sumner.
Olympia represents a heavy investment: a rumoured £5 million for Sotheby’s. Ironically, it will try to make up for the firm’s largely unsuccessful internet venture. Nevertheless, it faces a number of problems. The location, on a frequently grid-locked road, is far from ideal, and antique dealers are unhappy about the auction house invading their balliwick. Already Sotheby’s has agreed not to give estimates on pieces brought in from the big Olympia art fairs.
I asked Mr Sumner why the firm needed to be present in the middle market as well as the high end. “We want to give our clients a complete service. Most people have a mix of things, and until now we have had to turn business away because we did not have the facility,” he said. (The firm does have a country saleroom at Billingshurst, but this was not popular with vendors. Most of its sales have now been moved to Olympia, and there will be some redundancies).
Meanwhile, Christie’s South Kensington have confirmed that the threats over the future of its saleroom in South Kensington have been ended “for the moment”, with permission to create an additional floor for a new saleroom and more warehousing and storage.
Opened in 1975, the saleroom turned over £99.5 million ($140 million) last year, and handles some 60,000 items per year at an average price of about £1,500 ($2,100) each.
Originally appeared in The Art Newspaper as ‘A bid for the middle market'