Withnail & I
Est. MCMXCVIII · Cecil Court
The Curators’ Club for Collectors, Dealers & Curious Minds
Founded in 1998 by a former Christie’s cataloguer and a BBC Antiques Roadshow consultant. Twenty-seven years on, we are still at the same London address — and still turning down roughly six out of every ten pieces offered to us.
£180 per year · 4,820 members in 41 countries · 71% renew each year
Plates No. 247 – 252 · Recent Acquisitions
From 31,500 items offered in 2024, our 14 specialists accepted 38% under our 47-point provenance and condition review. The four plates below are typical of the standard.
Editor’s Note · Margaret Holroyd, Co-Founder
If you have ever stood in a marquee at a country-house fair and wondered why the good things never seem to make it to the public stalls, this is, broadly, why. Most of what we accept does not survive the journey. A carved mahogany side table arrives from a probate solicitor in Frome with one leg rebuilt in the wrong wood. A set of six Hepplewhite chairs proves to be three genuine, three copies — almost the right thing, almost never the right price. A “George I walnut” secretaire turns out, on close inspection, to be its own badly-considered 1903 wedding present.
We turn down about six out of every ten pieces offered. We do not enjoy this, and our specialists do not get any pleasure from being suspicious. But a club is only as good as what it admits, and members join us because they have somewhere else to look and would rather not.
After twenty-seven years the list of people we will not buy from is, depressingly, longer than the list of those we will. The two together amount to about 12,000 pieces a year that get past the front gate — those are the ones that arrive at Cecil Court, are catalogued, photographed, condition-checked, condition-reported (in plain English, never in trade jargon), and offered, in strict rotation, to members before they go anywhere near an open listing.
If that sounds like the kind of dealing you would rather do, the door is open. The membership form takes about four minutes.
— M.H., November 2025
The Audited Record
No superlatives — the figures below are the result of continuous trade from 1998 to the most recent annual review.
Average member tenure 6.4 years · 71% renew year-on-year · 94% would recommend to a fellow collector (2024 survey).
Membership
The Curators’ Club is our private membership for collectors, dealers, and interior designers who would rather be told “no, it isn’t right” than buy a problem. The fee pays for the vetting process, the indexing, and the building.
Members see new pieces before they are listed in the Journal or to the wider market — roughly 48 hours of exclusivity on every plate that passes the desk.
The printed index of British decorative arts we have published since 2005 — cited by Bonhams and Dreweatts, and posted to members each January.
Unaccompanied viewing during opening hours, six days a week. Tea, a loupe, and time. Private appointments outside hours are free of charge.
Members may write, telephone, or call in to the relevant desk. We do not run a switchboard; the people who vetted the piece are the people who take the call.
Membership is open to collectors, dealers, designers, and the genuinely curious. We do not ask for trade references — only for an honest account of what you collect and why.
