The Collection

The collection cohered around a single acquisition. In 2003 a Ferrari F40—Italian-delivered, held by one owner until his death, then released from his estate with the purchase order, factory letter, and unused service book still intact—passed into the custody that holds it today. The decision was not impulsive. It established the rule: original finishes where they survive, paperwork that can be followed, and a refusal to treat the car as a static asset. What followed was not a buying spree. It was a sequence of choices against that same measure.

Two principles have governed every addition. The first is resolution: each car must be an idea you can still read in the metal—a brief, a regulation, or a stubborn engineer made visible in proportion, cooling paths, and the way the body meets the road. Not the loudest output, not the rarest production run, but the clearest answer to the question its era actually asked.

The second is continuity. The collector has not purchased machines to end their histories; he has accepted custodianships he believes he can honour. A McLaren F1 maintained exclusively by McLaren Special Operations. A Countach held from new near Bologna, sent to Polo Storico only where cooling and perishables demanded it. An Aston Martin DB5 that spent four decades with one Cotswolds family before a sympathetic refresh at Newport Pagnell. A Koenigsegg returned to Ängelholm for every service since factory delivery. The question has stayed the same: under my care, will this car still recognise itself in five years' time?

None of the five are restored in the concours sense. Where work has been done, it has been recommissioning—honest wake-ups, replaced rubber and fluids, the mechanical modesty of letting an engine run without theatre. The F40's paint is still Maranello's. The CCX's cabin is still the aniline leather it left Sweden wearing. The F1 is driven, rarely but deliberately. Preservation first. Intervention second. Nothing here has been made to look period-correct; it was simply never persuaded to become anything else.

The garage does not grow. Opportunities arrive; most are set aside unread. Five cars can be known the way one knows a house—which document sits in which folio, how each sounds at cold start, which bend each prefers. A sixth would alter the arithmetic of attention. When the building was drawn, it was drawn around that number. It has not been enlarged, and the count has not moved.

This page answers the same polite question, asked too often: could someone describe the collection without travelling to see it? It is not an open invitation, and it is not a catalogue. It is a narrow, permanent record for those who already have a reason to look—and no obligation to make the journey.