Family Business
17 June 2021
A conversation with the ‘big guy’ in English antique furniture - dealer Simon Phillips.
Thomas Woodham-Smith
Thomas Woodham-Smith is an art dealer and advisor, and our Fair Director.
Simon Phillips in his showroom in Mayfair.
Image courtesy of Ronald Phillips.
Sitting in his pine-panelled Mayfair office in Bruton Street, sipping on a double espresso, it is perhaps hard to consider the plutocratic figure of Simon Phillips as a survivor. Minions bustle and he keeps a weather eye on his phone and the CCTV screens that flicker beside his desk. Simon is the ‘big guy’ in English antique furniture. His shop is on two floors and distributed through the rooms are a series of furniture masterworks. His stock is one gold bar after another. If you are looking to buy furniture this is where you come to buy the best. It won’t be cheap - there are no bargains here - but if you have deep pockets and seek trophies this is the one-stop shop.
Before Simon joined, the business of Ronald Phillips was firmly established as one among the many art and antique dealers in Mayfair. In those days there were numerous famous names in and around Bond St: Mallett, Partridge, Colnaghi, The Fine Art Society, Agnews, and many more. Simon’s father ran a tidy, mainly trade, business which he had started in 1952. The traders were local and collegiate and they visited each other buying and selling for low margins in a convivial manner. The ensuing decades wrought a significant change to the West End. The fashion world moved in and the art and antique dealers either closed or moved off the high street. Ronald Phillips, selling the best English 18th century furniture, is the last one, a bloom in the desert.
Simon does not want to reveal, and it is hard to tell, whether he was dragged along or an enthusiastic participant when, starting at the tender age of 6, he went on buying trips with his father. Those long hours in the back of the car clearly sparked something in Simon because in 1979 at the age of 18 he asked if he could join the family business rather than heading off to university. His two older siblings were amazed that he sought such a fate, convinced that their father would be hard to work for, but it proved to be the ideal role for him.
A pair of George III Ormolu Ice Pails by Benjamin Vulliamy, 1811, English, 30.5 x 22 cm.
Image courtesy of Ronald Phillips.
Over an extended apprenticeship of nearly 20 years he encouraged, cajoled and perhaps even bullied his father into moving away from a dealer-focussed business to dealing almost exclusively with private clients and museums. He recalls that his first acts on joining were to insist that his father got a second telephone, and to extract him from behind the antediluvian typewriter where he laboriously processed invoices by employing, much against his fathers wishes, a secretary. Hardly shocking to us but a revolutionary act in Conduit St. He pushed for the firm to exhibit regularly at the Grosvenor House Antique Fair (in 2009 he was one of the founding partners of the Masterpiece fair) and to produce catalogues. In those days simply being an exhibitor at that fair was a stamp of authority and these days catalogues are such a familiar marketing device, it is hard to appreciate how innovative this was and expensive. The business has produced a hard back one every year since 1997 and currently it costs around £75,000 to produce.
Around 1995 Simon put together the funds to buy out control of the company from his father. He was already the key salesman and buyer and it was his energy that was driving the company, so it was the obvious move. Over the ensuing years, despite his increasing local isolation, the firm of Ronald Phillips has traded its way to preeminence. When I ask him, Simon puts it down to working a seven-day week, buying bravely (i.e. spending a lot more money than anyone else to secure things) and meticulous cataloguing. But a lot of people work hard and don’t achieve success or even survive in the art world. I think that Simon has a secret weapon and that is his ability to connect with people. He loves fine wine and eating in restaurants and is almost obsessive about paying. He lavishes generosity on his clients and provides a support service that other dealers could not even imagine. No one else in this business joins everything up in his singular way and where you observe uniqueness there must lie the difference between him and the rest.
Detail from a George III mahogany writing table almost certainly by William Vile. Sold to the Met and only similar one in Queen’s collection at Windsor Castle.
Image courtesy of Ronald Phillips.
Whilst his close relationships with clients are part of his business at the core is the stock. Though the Ronald Phillips business sells almost nothing made post 1820 there is a clear recognition of modern times and taste. He observes that a Chippendale tripod table is now more desirable and consequently valuable than a Chippendale bookcase; sideboards are unsellable, and satinwood furniture, once a darling of the trade, is now comparatively “worthless”. He buys great desks - “Every great man needs a great desk” - and has made a speciality of spectacular mirrors.
The business has not been impervious to the vicissitudes of the covid pandemic and Simon has put the brakes on buying of late, but he still has a stock of over 1000 items, costing somewhere significantly in excess of £10 million. Many of his finest purchases he keeps tucked away, waiting for the perfect moment to reveal them or for the possibility of building up sets or making pairs through cunning buying. Thinking of the future he wonders whether his teenage children will enter the business but ruefully concludes that they will more likely orientate towards art and sculpture. But one thing is certain, if he is to survive, the seven-day weeks will have to continue.
A version of this article was previously published in The Critic Magazine in June 2021.
More from the magazine
