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Last week, Sotheby’s took over the ritzy St. Regis Island Resort on Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Island, transforming two of its restaurants into showrooms—one touting handbags, diamonds, and watches, the other staging a non-selling display of $500 million worth of art. In the palm-shaded gardens overlooking the Persian Gulf, the auction house parked a fleet of rare and expensive cars.
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The week marked the inaugural Abu Dhabi Collectors’ Week, a Sotheby’s-branded event featuring workshops, talks, and several open-air luxury auctions held Friday night under a low-slung full moon.
Led by a top brass delegation including CEO Charles Stewart, the house netted $133 million—far surpassing its first Middle East luxury sale in February, when a multi-category auction in Saudi Arabia brought in just $17 million. The earlier sale, held in Diriyah, a suburb of Riyadh that has lately played host to cultural events, was surprisingly tepid given the region’s booming luxury market, worth nearly $13 billion, according to a report earlier this year by Dubai-based retailer and distributor Chalhoub Group
(All prices include fees unless otherwise noted.)
In Abu Dhabi, the house tweaked its strategy by selling only luxury goods—and no art—and by bringing several blockbuster lots. Among them was a McLaren car that Formula 1 driver Ayrton Senna used to win his first home race in Brazil in 1991. It sold for a cool $25.3 million. Following its record-setting $10.1 million Birkin bagsale in July, Sotheby’s put up another Hermès handbag once owned by Jane Birkin. It quadrupled its high estimate to sell for $2.9 million. The Desert Rose, a hulking 31.68-karat “orangy pink” diamond, went for $8.1 million (high estimate: $7 million) after a tense 20-minute bidding battle. It whipped the baying crowd into such a frenzy that barely anyone noticed the next lot, a set of four Patek Philippe Complication watches, which sold for $11.9 million, bang on their low estimate. The sale dedicated to jewels and timepieces, titled “Precision and Brilliance,” achieved white-glove status (meaning all lots sold), taking $25.4 million—about $5 million short of its high estimate.
Sotheby’s also put two properties up for sale on Friday night. A huge villa in Cap Ferrat on the French coast listed for just over $40 million failed to find a buyer, but a property in Austria went for $20.1 million—more or less its estimate.
Before the auctions on Friday, Sotheby’s global head of luxury, Josh Pullan, told ARTnews that Saudi Arabia and the UAE are different enough luxury markets that they require unique approaches. “It’s Sotheby’s job to figure out how to bring the right format, whether that’s education, private sales, exhibitions, talks, or auctions,” he said.
While the auctions were the headline event last week, the house offered 50 lots, estimated to be worth around $100 million, for sale privately. As Pullan noted, public auctions are new to the region. It stands to reason, then, that Sotheby’s thinks locals prefer to buy privately. Still, Pullan wouldn’t divulge the house’s take on the private lots.
“We’re here to grow a market, and that’s going to take time,” Pullan said. “This is definitely the most ambitious [series of luxury auctions] Sotheby’s has done in terms of programming and on-site experience.”
Collectors’ Week coincided with the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix and the Middle East and Africa Summit 2025, also at the St. Regis. There were plenty of suits milling around sporting lanyards and talking numbers; at times it felt like a business conference. But the convergence of the three events added to the buzz.
Abu Dhabi Collectors’ Week appears to be the next stage of Sotheby’s engagement with the emirate. Last year, the sovereign wealth fund ADQ acquired a minority stake in the house as part of a $1 billion injection of capital. And in April, Sotheby’s staged an exhibition in Abu Dhabi called “Beyond: The World’s Rarest Diamonds,” showcasing, among other stones, the Desert Rose, which it sold last week. Perhaps that drove local demand; almost a quarter of the evening’s buyers came from the UAE.
For Sotheby’s and Abu Dhabi, Collectors’ Week appears to be a rare win-win: Sotheby’s gets a direct line to an increasingly important source of wealth looking to collect rare and expensive objects, while Abu Dhabi continues to establish itself as an important node in the cultural sphere.
The UAE has been working to diversify its income away from oil for several decades, with a heavy emphasis on growing its tourism sector. That effort is what has driven Abu Dhabi to funnel billions into developing a cluster of mega-museums on Saadiyat Island—not far from the St. Regis. Among the institutions already opened or soon to open: the Louvre Abu Dhabi, the National History Museum, the Zayed National Museum, and the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi.
And while the fairs Art Dubai and Abu Dhabi Art—soon to be rebranded as Frieze Abu Dhabi—have worked to grow the country’s collector base, that still appears to be very much a work in progress, according to reporting by ARTnews’s Daniel Cassady and Nadine Khalil. Much of the money buying art there seems to come from the country’s leaders or state-backed museums. The record-breaking $236 million sale in November of Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer (1914–16) is rumored to have gone to Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the UAE’s president, at least according to Artnet’s Kenny Schachter. While Sotheby’s has not commented on the buyer, as is standard practice, that dynamic may point to why the house’s exhibition during Collectors’ Week, dubbed “Icons,” was non-selling. That show included Andy Warhol’s Nine Marilyns (1962) and a crystalline limestone figure of a lioness from 3000–2800 BCE. In an unusual move, their labels proudly displayed each work’s auction record—$47.3 million and $57.1 million, respectively
UAE-based art patron and businessman Elie Khouri, an ARTnews Top 200 Collector, told me that he presumed “Sotheby’s is going to be the main source of great works for the museums in Abu Dhabi.”
At the exhibition, which had 4,000 visitors throughout the week, I asked Courtney Kremers, Sotheby’s head of private sales for the Americas, if revealing the price for each work was just a flex. “We want to educate the public about the art market, and this is one way to do it,” she said. “Someone might see the $57.1 million price tag and then be inclined to read the whole story about the work.”
Last year, Sotheby’s consolidated luxury sales topped $2 billion—a figure it has hit for three consecutive years—accounting for roughly a third of the house’s $6 billion total in 2024. According to Sotheby’s, that result is triple its 2019 luxury total and remains the highest such figure in the industry. Private luxury sales also grew by 350 percent over the previous year. That number is likely to climb higher in 2025, thanks to the $133 million generated last week.
As the hammer came down on the Desert Rose to wild applause on Friday, Stewart, Sotheby’s CEO, told me that he believed luxury sales have the potential to one day usurp art sales for the house. He was keen to stress, however, that he “doesn’t see luxury and art competing against each other.”
“The truth is that our heritage, DNA, and identity are very much rooted in fine art, but the addressable market sizes across all luxury categories, such as cars, watches, spirits, and real estate, are far larger than the art market,” he said. “So, to answer your question, I do think luxury sales have the potential to one day outstrip art sales, but they very much compliment one another.”
While the sports cars were driven one by one past the rostrum—from a 1986 Ferrari Testarossa “Monospecchio” to a 2006 Ford GT—Oliver Barker, Sotheby’s Europe chairman, told me that there is huge institutional interest in luxury in Abu Dhabi. Museums, it seems, will be among the house’s most valuable customers in the UAE.
The cars generated a total of $79.3 million. Duccio Lopresto, Sotheby’s managing director of the Middle East and Africa, told ARTnews that Friday’s result “was the largest cross-category luxury sale ever conducted, and one of the biggest multi-lot car auctions in the EMEA.”
“Abu Dhabi’s vision of becoming the global capital of culture, luxury, and collecting is now taking shape,” Lopresto said. “These auctions are clear proof of that reality.”
