Art collectors worldwide transform their living spaces into personal museums to showcase their curated collections in intimate and unique settings. Home galleries offer a personalized experience unmatched by public galleries.
The practice elevates the home’s ambience and allows the collectors to create a narrative through their collections.
For example, real estate mogul Grant Cardone has been collecting art for about 15 years but doesn’t consider himself a connoisseur.
“I’m very new to the art world,” Cardone told CNBC. “If I like it, I buy it. I don’t care who did it.”
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Pieces from Cardone’s collection adorn his house and home gallery, boasting floor-to-ceiling windows and security. His collection includes a piece by American graffiti artist Retna, purchased in an online auction for about $140,000, along with works by American pop artist Burton Morris and a painting by American contemporary artist Kenny Scharf.
With about 17 million followers on social media, Cardone occasionally offers art investing advice on his platforms. They’ve asked him whether investing in art has been a good decision.
“I’m like, yeah, it’s good for me. … It’s better than the dollar or the euro. … The stock market doesn’t give me any fulfillment; I don’t go back and look at my Apple shares and feel good about it. But I walk in my gallery or down the kitchen or in my office and I see a piece, and I’m like, man, it’s super cool,” he said.
Former investment banker Christian Levett started his collection nearly 30 years ago with old master paintings and Roman Greek and Egyptian antiquities. He then moved on to collecting pieces by female abstract expressionists.
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Levett owns an art museum in Mougins, France, and conducts tours of the artwork hanging in his home in Florence, Italy. The house features original frescoes and two floors of art by women. His collection includes pieces by impressionist Mary Cassatt and surrealist Dorothea Tanning. Additionally, he owns a 1977 painting by American artist Joan Mitchell for which he paid about $2.8 million in 2015.
“It’s now probably a $15 million to $18 million picture at auction. … Mitchell has always been one of the most important female painters of the 20th century,” Levett said.
Husband and wife Christian and Karen Boros live in a 6,000-square-foot penthouse above their collection, housed in a former World War II bunker in Berlin, which they purchased in 2003. Raoul Zoellner, director of the Boros Foundation, said that about 450 tons of concrete ceilings and walls were removed to convert the bunker, which sheltered up to 4,000 people during the war, into an exhibition space and residence.
“The bunker is not a museum but an exceptional project initiated by an enthusiastic collector couple who could not have imagined how many diamond saws it would take to tear down dozens of bunker walls — or what that would set in motion,” Zoellner wrote in an email to CNBC.
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