“Oh yeah,” Graham Weir, Marketing Manager at The Cultivated Collector says. “We’re going long on Lamborghini.” Indeed, the modest showroom space in the end-of-the-train-line hamlet of New Canaan, Connecticut, is brimming with them. Countaches bookend a Diablo, its scissor door up, giving a clear view of the gated manual shifter inside. For years, Lamborghinis of this era were little more than symbols for the white lines excess of the Eighties and Nineties. Now enthusiasts are starting to appreciate them for what they are: low-volume boutique supercars from a prestigious Italian automaker. Their value is rocketing.
As little as five years ago, the most expensive Diablo to sell on online auction house Bring a Trailer went for about a quarter of a million dollars. Today, that’s the range for the least expensive Diablo on the market, and good examples will fetch double that.
Understanding these changing tastes and picking out undervalued cars that are about to pop off takes a practiced eye and refined taste. The Cultivated Collector’s name, in this sense, works.
There is difficulty, though, in getting these cars right. Diablos in particular are tricky to keep in good shape. Lamborghini had a handful of different owners all through that model’s production run. The last of those was Audi, but parent company Volkswagen doesn’t keep parts for anything beyond the Murcielago, Weir explains. Even then, it’s iffy.
“These are hugely expensive cars being sold to very discerning individuals,” says founder Matthew Ivanhoe, speaking with Robb Report on the phone from Europe. “Delivering a high-quality product is paramount. It comes with a lot of pressure.” Ivanhoe is in Europe not only to run down leads on a few possible cars to buy but also to check on some restoration projects and make sure everything is running smoothly.
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Image Credit: Raphael Orlove Ivanhoe estimates that the average transaction of The Cultivated Collector now hovers around $750,000. But it’s Ivanhoe’s eclectic taste that keeps the showroom diverse. “The reality is I don’t believe in just having your head in the 7-8 figure clouds. I have plenty of clients who have the horsepower for the 7-8 figure cars, but have a lot of love for the ones that are $100k.” If he were to grab the keys to anything in the showroom right now, sure it’d be a Diablo, but the coolest car he’s traded in lately might be a punchy 1970 Mini Cooper S police car, one of 22 delivered to the Liverpool Police Department. “To me, cool is cool. I don’t care what the price point is.”
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Image Credit: Raphael Orlove Certainly, millions and millions of dollars worth of cars move through The Cultivated Collector’s showroom, though sales can be infrequent. One of Ivanhoe’s particular treasures, a Jaguar XJR-15, suns itself by the window. It is one of only a few dozen ever produced, built by TWR, Jaguar’s motorsports partner at the time. It’s as close as we ever got to a road-legal version of the XJR-9s -12s that won the 24 Hours of Le Mans outright before the economic collapse of the early ‘90s that killed Jag’s budget. Ivanhoe is particular about each detail of this car, the racing transmission, and various motorsport-spec parts on its enormous naturally-aspirated V12 cradled in its carbon-fiber chassis. The XJR-15 blends motorsports technology with road-going legality in a way not seen since the blue-chip classics of the 1950s and ‘60s. Recent auction listings place its value well over a million. There’s little doubt that figure is climbing, as a new generation appreciates it as the classic it is.
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Image Credit: Raphael Orlove Ahead of the yellow Jag broods a black 962, arguably the greatest sports racing car of all time, with a run of overall Le Mans wins stretching out over a decade. “That’s the last of the six 962 CR/LMs that Vern Schuppan produced before bankruptcy,” Ivanhoe explains. “It was acquired by one of VSL’s backers, an executive at a UK glass manufacturer, as a retainer on note. It stayed in his office on the third floor for 15 years.” The car eventually made its way to America, where, in 2018, Ivanhoe acquired it. This is a 230-mph car, faster down the Mulsanne straight than anything that races today. “Aside from the fact that it’s very low and the steering is so heavy at parking speeds, it’s very easy to drive,” Ivanhoe says. “The clutch is easy. It’s not too loud.”
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Image Credit: Raphael Orlove No other dealership in America, maybe the world, stocks cars like this in a showroom. Certainly none stock so many of them together. These are iconic cars to a new generation, many of them homologation specials, as accomplished on the track as they are good on the road. There may not be a faster dealership anywhere on the planet.
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Image Credit: Raphael Orlove Finding these perfect cars – the thrill of the hunt – makes the business interesting. But it’s tricky work. Everyone knows Lamborghini, but The Cultivated Collector also trades in more obscure or fringe machinery. Some can come in at the right time and soon be out the door, as is the case for a Saleen S7, photographed here on its last day before shipping off to its new owner. Others, like an inky black late-model DeTomaso Pantera, can take much longer for the right buyer to come along. The last Pantera in the showroom ended up getting shipped to the Netherlands, where its mid-mounted Ford V8 is far more exotic than its Italian coachwork. These cars give the showroom a serene quality. They’re all patiently waiting for their moment.
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Image Credit: Raphael Orlove Much of these sales never end up on the website. “I liken us to an iceberg,” Ivanhoe says. For all of The Cultivated Collector’s presence online – its Instagram handle hangs over the entryway in neon – much of its business is done quietly and privately without ever touching the Internet. “For a lot of our clientele,” says Ivanhoe, “it has to be that way.” He has his buyers, who tell him to let them know when a particular rare something comes in. When it does, it’s gone in an instant.
