I’ve been told many tales by auction insiders about the lengths Sotheby’s and the other big houses will go to impress well-heeled collectors, including flying them into major sales in New York, London, or Hong Kong, putting them up in luxury hotels, and even organizing private tours and lavish dinners. At the end of last year, Sotheby’s formalized—and outsourced—this behind-closed-doors, ad hoc client schmoozing by announcing a partnership with Indagare, a membership-based luxury travel agency. Together, they are offering “V.I.P. itineraries where fine art, world-class cuisine, and insider cultural access meet—whether in a Ferrari factory in Modena or at a private dinner in the Louvre Abu Dhabi,” the house’s website reads.

A selection of group trips is currently being advertised online, from “Sotheby’s Venice: Inside the Biennale” to “Sotheby’s Modena: Slow Food, Fast Cars with Massimo Bottura.” The former will set you back $17,900, and includes three nights at the five-star Gritti Palace and out-of-hours visits to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and Gallerie dell’Accademia. Trippers can also expect “an insider perspective” on the biennale from Lorenzo Rebecchini, Sotheby’s managing director for Italy. The Modena trip costs up to $21,900 per person, and includes “exclusive-access tasting experiences” at three of Bottura’s restaurants, one of which has a Michelin star.

Melissa Biggs Bradley, a former editor of Town & Country, founded Indagare in 2007. She told me that Sotheby’s has also asked her to curate trips for individual clients, but kept the specifics under wraps. “Sotheby’s clients have requested a range of travel experiences, from a relaxing time in the South of France to hiking in Scandinavia and trips focused on history in the Middle East,” she told me. “In some cases there may be an art focus, but not always. The common denominator is best-in-class experiences and local expertise.”

On Sotheby’s website, it states that the house “receives a financial incentive for trips booked through this collaboration.” Both the house and Biggs Bradley, however, refused to disclose the cut. Sotheby’s chief marketing officer, Gareth Jones, told me the main purpose of the partnership “is to connect collectors with the ideas, art, and destinations shaping global culture. These artfully designed experiences build on Sotheby’s tradition of creating access to the rare and remarkable.”

In many ways, the new services build on the work that Sotheby’s has been doing since 2015, when it took a 25 percent stake in the car auctioneer RM Auctions and became the first and only auction house with a restoration shop. The operation was ahead of the luxury personalization curve, and for the last 11 years, Gord Duff, RM’s president, has been taking outlandish requests from car buyers. “We just did a 1924 Hispano-Suiza with a wood body and spent 12,000 hours restoring it,” he told me. “It had an alligator interior, so we had to go out and buy 50 hides to do two seats with. They came from Louisiana, where Hermès sources its leather. That’s what the car had in it when it was new, in 1924, and the client wanted that. That’s $100,000 in hides for a couple of seats.”

Duff, who spearheads a team of 45 mechanics and restorers out of Ontario, Canada, has also been asked to upholster a car’s interior with ostrich leather. “Sometimes we do small extra projects, like if we have leftover interior material, we might make a matching purse for a client’s wife,” he said. “We once had a client bring in his favorite tie and ask us to match the car’s paint to it—it was orange and red. That car was an Auburn Speedster.”

As Sotheby’s continues pushing for new ways to personalize experiences and rare objects for clients, I asked Josh Pullan, Sotheby’s global head of luxury, what else the house is prepared to customize. “The expansion into new services and new categories is part of our ongoing commitment to innovation and growing our audiences,” he told me, a smooth nonanswer that still signaled their focus on meeting clients’ desires. But one decent bet might be road bikes, which are highly customizable—and the hype around a quartet of ultrarare Colnago road bikes at Collectors’ Week in Abu Dhabi, one of which sold for over $190,000, may suggest Sotheby’s is looking to go further into this niche, enthusiast-filled space.

Thanks, George. I’ll be back on Sunday with an interview with Eric Crosby, the Henry J. Heinz II director of the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh. The quadrennial Carnegie International opens this weekend. I look forward to seeing you then.

M