Art as a family asset — where to start.

After twelve years on the board of Christie's, our Founder Gilles has seen both sides of the art market. For families, art is seldom a pure investment. It is part of the family's soul — and it needs its own discipline.

Across twelve years on the board of Christie's plc, one thing became clear to Gilles: the art market is a maze for anyone entering it from the outside.

On one side sit the buyers, who fall into four broad categories:

• collectors
• speculators
• asset-driven investors
• lifestyle buyers

The market is animated by thousands of advisers. A handful are genuinely reliable and expert; many more lack the combination of loyalty and competence a family requires.

And then there is the product itself: the art. It is created by a mix of artists in which established names sit alongside others whose value will not survive the decade.

Most families prefer to stay out of this world altogether — unless they are already part of it. Yet art can hold a meaningful place on a family's balance sheet, both as a means of preserving wealth and as a medium of intergenerational transmission. When a family does choose to engage, the decisions that matter are taken well before any specific purchase.

Westwick helps families step into this world through a two-step process. First, we sit with the family to decide what role, if any, art should play in their overall ecosystem — asset, legacy, passion, or some combination of the three. Once that role is clear, we help them take a broader view of art as an asset class and design how it should be sized, acquired, and held. Only then do we steer them toward the advisers who are genuinely competent and aligned — advisers our partners have personally worked with and can vouch for.

The work is demanding for one particular reason. Unlike a listed stock, art is almost never bought on pure investment criteria. A family invests part of its soul in the object — and taking that fact seriously is what separates a good adviser from a mercenary one.