Brans New Day

Scoop Homes & Art #29, Winter 2011
Georgina Walsh | 30 Jun 2010

From mechanic to mogul – we step back in history as Clive Brans celebrates 35 years in the business and a career that has seen him become one of the top names in the Australian antiques industry.

Countless days doing odd jobs in his grandmother’s secondhand shop and evenings watching his auctioneer father balance the day’s takings planted the seed for what would one day become Clive Brans’ passion for wheeling and dealing antiques.

After an initiation selling “good silver and lots of junk” at the Fremantle Markets, Clive set about becoming one of Australia’s most knowledgeable and respected antiques dealers. Although his son John now runs the business, which they share 50/50, Clive still gets a thrill from the hunt and from snatching up a rare piece from under someone’s less-knowledgeable nose.

However, he’s quick to point out that he doesn’t love all antiques. “In fact, many I hate with a loathing,” he says from his Mosman Park home, which has almost as many antiques as his nearby shop Brans Antiques and Art.

Bright modern paintings complement an eclectic collection of antiques from myriad eras and corners of the globe, creating the warmth that Clive says every home needs. “Though this is probably a bit overdone,” he says, gesturing around his living room. “You wouldn’t want to photograph this.” [However, we’d beg to differ.]

He goes on to describe what he does enjoy about antiques. “I love them if they have good design, great shape and form; love them if they have great colour and patina, which gives them an individuality that can only be achieved over time. I love the fact that two identical pieces used in different places and positions can have a completely different look after 100 years.

“I love the fine workmanship and the history behind both the item and the manufacturers and designers,” he says.

“I love the warmth they can give a home. I particularly love the way that the right items can be mixed with ultra-modern furniture to change an average modern aluminium, glass and concrete box into something warmer and more liveable.”

Clive believes his passion began as a small boy in London, where his father worked for a company called WE Coe & Company, which eventually became Christie’s South Kensington. “Today, it would be the most successful auction room in the country,” explains Clive. “I used to go to the auction rooms and muck around, and my grandmother had a secondhand shop in Lillie Road in Fulham.”

Clive describes how “junk” was sold in his grandmother’s shop, as well as items that would be considered good antiques today.

“In those days, if someone rang the auction room about Victorian furniture, they would suggest it went to the tip, unless it was something really special,” laughs Clive.

“But she also dealt in all sorts of junk and rubbish. One of my jobs on a Sunday morning was to go and smash up marble clock cases to take out the brass movement to give to the scrap man. It makes me laugh that today those clocks can sell for thousands of dollars.”

It’s these sorts of memories that stick with Clive. “I remember they bought loads of furniture polish one day, literally thousands of tins of it, and they made a fortune out of it. They bought the lot for about five quid and sold it for about a pound a tin, or 50p or something.”

Then the family moved to the country and Clive’s dad worked in a small auction room in Weybridge. It was here that Clive picked up the ins and outs of the auction room.

“Every week, every time they had a sale, Dad would bring all the money home and I remember sitting on the couch at night while he balanced it and talked about the prices. That was our life. It becomes a way of life.”

However, Clive took his father’s advice that the antiques business had no future. “Everyone wanted to follow their father, but he told me it was a dead-end business and that I should do a trade.”

Clive started working for himself as a mechanic after he finished an apprenticeship. He then met his future wife Barbara at a pub and followed her to Swanbourne in Western Australia “and that was the end of that”.

The next major change in his life came as a result of meeting Perth auctioneer Bob Gregson. “I noticed at auction how much these bits of silver were bringing in, so on my first trip back to England a year or so later, I trundled off to auction,” he says.

His father’s contacts took him under their wing and he began buying silver. He was still working as a mechanic, but every holiday he flew to England and bought silver, which Gregsons Auctioneers sold for him.

It was at this point that Clive says his passion was truly ignited. “It was when I suddenly got involved in buying the bits of silver… I knew this was me. I thought: ‘This is it. I’ve found my niche in life.’ Then you look back and realise, yes, you did have a background in it.”

After a bit of convincing from Bob, Clive chucked in his garage job to become a dealer and started selling items from the back of his ute during the week and at the Fremantle Markets on the weekend.

“I sold an enormous amount. I made a fortune at the market. And a lot of what I was selling was junk. There’s money in muck. The margins are big in junk. At the top end of the market, the margins get smaller and smaller,” explains Clive, adding that he also sold a lot of good silver.

It was a great learning curve for Clive, who clearly remembers the deal that pushed him into his own business.

“I sold a lot of items to one particular dealer and one day I sold him a Georgian fireplace,” he says. “He wouldn’t give me a profit, so I sold it to him for the $7 I had paid for it. After I went back the next day and saw it was $1400, I decided to open my own shop. I decided then, it’s time to move on.”

And he hasn’t looked back. He moved Clive Brans Antiques from the stall at the Fremantle Markets to a shop on Rokeby Road, Subiaco, then into a larger premises around the corner on Railway Parade. “By that stage, I was going to England and buying containers. Furniture became my great love – Georgian furniture at first. I studied it. I never went past a museum, and I still don’t…”

Then Clive bought his own place in Glyde Street, Mosman Park. It was with forward thinking that he managed to get his hands on the three shops that so many before him had tried to buy. The property, which housed a leg-waxing salon, a Vietnamese restaurant and an art gallery, had never been on the market but “every real estate agent in the area had been chasing them for years”.

So, instead of offering market value – the most recent sale in the street was $80,000 – Clive worked out what the property would be worth to him... long-term.

“I went to the old lady (who owned the property) and I said: ‘I’m going to give you $350,000.’ It was miles more than it was worth,” says Clive. The owner accepted his offer. The next property in the street went for $300,000. “We set the price,” he says.

Clive’s passion just kept growing. “I love the whole cut and thrust of the business. I love the hunt. It’s the hunt that’s the most important thing – hunting and finding something, having more knowledge than other people in the room. Knowledge is power in our business. Serious power,” says Clive. “It’s a constant learning curve. If you stop learning, you won’t progress. It’s all about finding something really good under other people’s noses.

“Because we live in a very small place, if I go to someone’s house privately and I think something is worth $20,000, I’ll offer them two-thirds of it because if I don’t make a third I don’t make a living. But if I find it in an antiques dealer’s shop or a secondhand shop and it’s got $5 on it, I’m not going to tell them it’s worth $20,000.

“Our great buys have been from dealers or at auction,” he says. “My greatest buy was from another dealer for a painting for $200 and I sold it for £42,000 (A$70,000). That, for us, is why hunt and knowledge is everything.”

Brans Antiques and Art (08) 9384 7300.