Sheikh Hamad bin Abdullah Al Thani and Alberto Pinto spent decades furnishing a house within sight of the Eiffel Tower, and its contents are expected to fetch about a fifth of what his last Paris house sale made.
More than 1,400 objects are leaving one house on Avenue Charles-Floquet, and Sotheby’s says every room they came from was conceived object by object under the supervision of the man now selling them.
Sotheby’s own pages supply the schedule, the names of the decorators and the 2022 Hôtel Lambert result. Galerie, Exibart, We-Wealth and the Berliner Zeitung carry the lot count and the expected total. An estimate is a hope with a range printed beside it, and nothing on Avenue Floquet has a price until the first evening session in Paris.
1,400 lots
Galerie, Exibart, We-Wealth and the Berliner Zeitung all put the count above 1,400. That is roughly what a household looks like once someone has written it all down. Sotheby’s describes a residence assembled over decades by Sheikh Hamad bin Abdullah Al Thani in close collaboration with the decorator Alberto Pinto, and the inventory bears that out. It runs from the giltwood, marble, silver and silk of the principal reception floor to the Art Deco, then on through a Kunstkammer and a day sale.
Pinto, who died in 2012, met Sheikh Hamad while he was working in the Gulf, according to Exibart, and the two stayed friends for life. Galerie goes further and calls him the collector’s mentor. A decorator who is also a friend is answerable to a stricter client.
The address helps. Sotheby’s places the house in the heart of the 7th arrondissement, overlooking the Eiffel Tower, and that view stays where it is when the furniture goes.
5 sales
Sotheby’s has split the house into five sales across a single week, and the order is a short course in how an auction house paces a collection. Part I, the evening sale, opens on 4 November at 6pm Central European Time. In the catalogue’s words, it brings together the highlights, from the reception floor’s finery to the best of the Art Deco. Part II, “Kunstkammer”, follows on the morning of 5 November at 10.30, and Part III, “L’écrin Art Déco”, takes the evening slot that day at 6pm. Part IV, the day sale, starts at 10.30 on 6 November. Part V runs online from 23 October and closes on 9 November.
Mario Tavella, president of Sotheby’s France and chairman of Sotheby’s Europe, fronts the sale, as he fronted the Hôtel Lambert in 2022. His description of Avenue Floquet sounds like an apology to the furniture for the crowds about to come and look at it.
“This was a home, a private universe away from public view,” Tavella told Galerie.
Five catalogues will now do the viewing for the public. Each one is a room with its door left open.
€15m
Exibart reports estimates running from €1,000 to €400,000 a lot and an expected total above €15m. We-Wealth and the Berliner Zeitung print the same total. The three most likely share a single release, so this is one figure reported three times.
Put it beside the Hôtel Lambert, which made €76,560,562 in 2022, and our own arithmetic gives a little under a fifth. The same sum divides the expected total across the lots and arrives at an average estimate of about €10,700, a figure that tells you almost nothing, because a sale of 1,400 pieces is held up at one end by silver spoons and at the other by a portrait.
The Lambert itself is the warning against reading estimates as forecasts. Its pre-sale range topped out at €63,522,400. The result came in above it.
€600,000
Galerie reports that a Bernard Boutet de Monvel portrait of Comte Edgard de Barral carries an estimate of €400,000 to €600,000. That is the figure a dinner table will remember, and it sits awkwardly with Exibart’s general range, which stops at €400,000. The portrait begins where Exibart’s range ends, and the printed catalogue is the place to settle which figure holds.
Sotheby’s names Boutet de Monvel, Eugène Printz and André Arbus among the highlights, the painter and two of the great French furniture names of the Art Deco years. We-Wealth goes further on the painter and calls the Boutet de Monvel group the most important to reach the market since 2016. Ten years is a long wait in a market that measures patience in seasons.
For anyone keeping score, the portrait’s high estimate amounts to about 4% of the whole expected total. Again, that is our sum, and estimates are not prices.
300 lots
We-Wealth reports that the silver alone runs to more than 300 lots, which makes it, by our count, something over a fifth of the sale. Silver is the part of a great house that gets used. It goes out for dinner and comes back to be polished.
The Part I description lists silver alongside giltwood, marble and silk as the materials of the principal reception floor. On Avenue Floquet, then, the silver came up from below stairs and took its place among the ornaments.
1913
Galerie dates the hôtel particulier to the early 20th century. Jean-Louis Gaillemin, writing in the catalogue, is more exact. He puts its conception in 1913 and credits Princess Hélène Soutzo, a friend of Marcel Proust, who built it with Prince Demetre Soutzo.
Galerie gives the line of owners in order: the Soutzos, then the writer Paul Morand, then São Schlumberger, then the Qatari Sheikh. It gives the order without the dates. Galerie also lists Pinto, the decorator Gabhan O’Keeffe and Hubert de Givenchy among those who shaped the place. That makes three strong eyes on one set of rooms, and any of them would have noticed if a cushion had been moved.
Exibart names Salvador Dalí, Andy Warhol, Cy Twombly, Yves Saint Laurent, Karl Lagerfeld and Valentino Garavani among the house’s guests. Galerie, more cautiously, speaks of guest appearances. Either way, a house where Proust’s friend once received has gone on receiving for more than a century, and now it receives bidders.
€76,560,562
The Hôtel Lambert is the yardstick every number on this page will be held to. Sheikh Hamad bought it in 2007, according to Artful Living, and began a meticulous renovation. In October 2022 Sotheby’s sold its contents over six volumes and more than 1,000 lots. The live sales ran from 11 to 14 October, Artnet reported, with the online sale open until 17 October.
The total was €76,560,562 against an estimate of €38,789,300 to €63,522,400. Sotheby’s calls it a world record for French decorative arts and for a “House Sale” staged at Sotheby’s. That second claim is the house’s own, about its own rooms, and it is made in exactly those terms. Artnet converted the total at about $75.4m on the day.
Tavella, in Sotheby’s own account of the Lambert, called it the most important sale he had ever worked on. Four years on, he is back at the rostrum with the same collector and a smaller house. Smaller is relative in the 7th arrondissement.
€200m
Xavier Niel bought the Hôtel Lambert building in 2022 for a reported €200m, according to Artful Living. Set beside the auction total, that means the walls fetched well over twice what the contents did. A Paris mansion keeps its value in its stone and its address, while its contents keep theirs in the provenance a catalogue can print.
The Floquet sales cover the contents only. What the house itself is worth, and who owns it next, is no part of what Sotheby’s is selling, and no serious outlet has put a figure on it.
120 objects
ARTnews lists Sheikh Hamad among its Top 200 collectors and describes him as a first cousin of the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani. The New York Times has reported that he began collecting at 18. ARTnews says the Al Thani Collection Foundation lends works to cultural venues around the world, and that 120 of its objects went on show in 2021 at the Hôtel de la Marine in Paris.
So the pattern is a public collection that travels and private houses that eventually sell. No reason for this sale has been given in public, and his personal fortune has never been put at a figure by any serious outlet. The catalogues are the nearest thing to a public account.
The obvious follow-up question is whether an ordinary buyer can take part, and from how much. The answer is yes, and Part V is the way in: it runs online until 9 November, and Exibart puts the lowest estimates in the sale at €1,000. That buys a small piece of a room Alberto Pinto once arranged around a view of the Eiffel Tower.
