Yours, Mine, OursThe luxury assets, & the relationships around them
We have been gathering beautiful objects for as long as we have been human, and the impulse has barely changed in the telling of it. What changed is who gets to do it. As disposable wealth widened, so did the habit, and the objects grew from shells and coins into Klimts and racing Ferraris. HSBC Private Bank's recent study of collecting makes a disarming case across its chapters: the buying is the easy part. Everything that comes after, the storing, the structuring and above all the passing on, is where collections either hold together or come apart. And almost all of it runs through a relationship of some kind.
01 / The beginningEvery collection starts as a love story
The English word arrived late, around the close of the eighteenth century, borrowed from the Latin colligere, to gather or bring together. The act itself is far older. Aristocratic Europeans filled rooms with Kunst-und Wunderkammern, cabinets of art and wonder. In Qing-dynasty China the same instinct produced the duobaoge, the cabinet of many treasures. In Britain they were called Chambers of Curiosities. What linked them across continents was not the size of a fortune. It was attachment.
The auction specialists interviewed for the HSBC report keep landing on the same observation. Investment may open a purchase, but feeling closes it. The bidder who pays the price that surprises the room is usually buying a personal connection rather than an asset class. That emotional charge is exactly what makes these objects so combustible later, when more than one person has a claim on the same feeling.
02 / The collectorsThe first museum on record was built by a woman
Long before the Louvre, a Neo-Babylonian high priestess named Ennigaldi-Nanna assembled and labelled a collection of antiquities in the 530s BCE, generally credited as the earliest museum we know of. Decades later and a world away, the Temple of Confucius displayed the philosopher's personal effects. The wish to collect and the wish to show what you have collected appear to be the same wish, arriving at the same time.
That history matters now because the field is rebalancing. Women account for roughly a quarter of the art market and are reshaping it as their share grows. Research cited in the report finds women under forty-five more culturally engaged and more values-led than their male peers, far likelier to collect under-represented artists and to lend, donate and put work into public view. The records are following. Frida Kahlo's El sueño set a new high for a female artist at $54.6 million, and the first woman to reach the global top ten did so only in 2014, with Georgia O'Keeffe. Who collects, in the end, shapes what culture chooses to keep.
03 / The divisionA painting cannot be cut in half
This is where collecting parts company with ordinary wealth. A bank balance splits to the penny. A set of four pictures worth ten times more together than apart does not, and asking heirs to choose between a clean sale and the harder road of shared ownership tends to surface every old family fault line at once.
The advisers in the report are candid that fairness is seldom about the valuation. It is about whether each person feels their attachment was seen. One adviser describes families where heirs take turns choosing pieces, others where the eldest chooses first, and many where the only peace available is to sell and divide the proceeds. The objects carry disproportionate value and disproportionate meaning, which is precisely why dividing them is so much harder than dividing anything else.
04 / The structureWhose name is actually on the Klimt?
When Gustav Klimt's Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer sold for $236.4 million in November 2025, the headline was the figure. The more revealing question was the structure behind it. In common-law countries that often means a trust, in civil-law ones a foundation, with family offices and donor advised funds increasingly in the mix. Done well, a structure keeps a collection intact across generations and reduces the risk of it being broken up by an unforeseen event. The report names one such event directly: a marital claim arising from an heir's future divorce or separation.
This is the territory our July partners know intimately. Payne Hicks Beach act at exactly the point where a treasured object meets the end of a relationship, where the line between an asset that is "yours", one that is "mine", and one a court may decide is "ours" turns out to be far less obvious than anyone assumed when the piece was bought. Nuptial agreements, the treatment of inherited and pre-acquired works, and the liquidity needed to cover estate tax without selling the very thing you wanted to protect all sit here.
05 / The transferThe Great Wealth Transfer has a lesser-known cousin
An estimated $992 billion in art and collectibles is expected to change hands over the next decade. Advisers have given this wave its own nickname, the Great Stuff Transfer, because it behaves so differently from money moving down a generation. Some of the items are extraordinary. Some are not. Sorting the two while grieving, often without any record of what exists or where it sits, can be its own slow ordeal.
The recurring failure in the report is not greed. It is silence. Conversations get deferred because they are uncomfortable to start at the breakfast table, decisions get spoken aloud but never written down, and fear of mortality keeps the whole subject at arm's length. The antidote the experts describe is unglamorous and effective. Audit what you own, talk openly about intentions, and formalise the plan so wishes are legally binding rather than fondly remembered.
06 / The entanglementThe wall is also a balance sheet
Art on the wall can double as collateral. Art lending lets owners borrow against works to raise finance for other purposes, sometimes to buy more art, and it appeals to those who are asset rich and looking to diversify. The mechanism is neat. The complication is human. The moment a couple or a family borrows against a shared work, the painting, the debt and the relationship are bound together, and an event in one becomes an event in all three.
07 / The personal onesWhat you wear, what you drive
Some passion assets are unusually intimate. A watch is worn, it travels, it changes hands, and it accumulates provenance in the most literal way. The report calls it portable wealth, which is part of why it appeals to people who move often and, not by coincidence, part of why it surfaces in disputes. A collector car is described as a living thing, rewarding attention and punishing neglect. Both are easy to love and, for that reason, easy to fight over when a relationship ends. The more personal the object, the more emotionally loaded its future ownership becomes.
Which returns us to where we began. These are the possessions that hold a life inside them, the proof of taste and time and partnership. The work is making sure the story you intended is the story that survives you, rather than the one that gets settled later by people who never heard you tell it.
Yours, Mine, Ours: Luxury Assets and the Relationships Around Them
Join The Dura Society and Payne Hicks Beach at Tramp this July for an evening on the assets we cherish and the relationships, legal and familial, that decide their fate. We will move from prenuptial planning and ownership structures to succession, divorce and the careful art of keeping a collection intact.
Places are limited and by invitation. To request yours, write to lottie@thedurasociety.com.
