Collector's Item

Queenstown-based antiques and art dealer Gary Mahan has always charted an independent course through life.

Words: Kate Coughlan  Photographs: Doc Ross

GARY MAHAN (RIGHT) IS the sort of chap mothers probably warned their daughters against. He’s stroppy, challenging and on an unpredictable path through life. He’s very free with his opinions. A most entertaining and intriguing bloke, for sure, with an eye for things gorgeous, glamorous and potentially profitable. And his home, a 1000sq m triumph of design and decoration, is a rare treat.

He’s always been a trader, except for a couple of years in his youth spent as a civil servant with the agriculture department. "It’s in the blood. I have always bought and sold stuff." His grandfather, Henry Denton, was a well-known auctioneer at William Todd & Co in Invercargill. Established in 1860, it is the oldest auction house in the land.

Gary Mahan is an Invercargill boy but (block your ears, Mayor Tim) he says the best view of Invercargill is the one in the rear-vision mirror. "I left when I was old enough to get on the bus. It is a great place to be brought up in but one doesn’t go back." That’s not quite true as he does go back regularly, but for sybaritic pleasures only. Each year, at the beginning of the oyster season, he and Sally (his wife of 26 years) drive south from their Queenstown home through Invercargill to Bluff to pick up the first 25 dozen oysters for his friends to savour. "The oyster run is a great tradition. Ah yes, I am a good southern boy at heart. Or we drive to Riverton, buy some blue cod and have lunch. Riverton rocks, you know," he says, adding a sparkling account of the attractions of that tiny coastal town at the bottom of the South Island.

It shouldn’t be surprising that such a sophisticate is crazy over a town that could be written off as a backwater. He likes to swim against the current, does Gary Mahan. "I’ve never been a follower. When all my friends were doing their overseas experience in London I went to the United States. I stopped importing from Asia, India and Korea in 1987, now everyone imports from there. I went to university in Dunedin for four years but didn’t finish my commerce degree. If I had got a degree I would not have been able to have the freedom I have enjoyed in my working life."

What set the under-graduated Mahan on his way was a six-week stint helping a friend in a jewellery business. "I went out and bought a book about making jewellery and decided to go into it myself. It was the early 1970s and I made silver bangles and jewellery set with turquoises."

The jewellery manufacturing became a big business and one that moved him to Auckland. For 20 years he had a goldsmithing factory in Pukekohe. He designed the jewellery, manufactured it and in the 1990s retailed it through a shopping-mall chain called The Gold Shop. What started out as hippy jewellery progressed into precious jewellery. He also began trading in antique and estate jewellery and jewellery he bought in the United Kingdom.

"I was very successful in the business, buying and selling antique and estate jewellery. At that time [the 70s] we had our little peso and I was buying overseas so it was a tight business."

In 1980 Gary established an exclusive shop in Auckland’s Remuera Road selling estate and antique jewellery. This was in the heady days preceding the international stock market collapse in October 1987.

"In the pre-crash times I had my best-ever years in business. I was fortunate to have dealt through those years when it was not uncommon for me to have in stock fabulous, highly collectable, international pieces of Fabergé, Cartier, etc. I was probably very lucky in that people were not frightened of showing off their wealth. In those final days I took some of the last cheques written by high-flyers before their empires collapsed. Those were the times when perhaps the wife got a tasteful $500 piece of jewellery while the secretary got a $25,000 thankyou present."

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