The first significant hurdle many active collectors will face is space—or the lack thereof. The Bells’ entire Manhattan home is given over to their collection, which covers every surface, including the floor. Steve Shane, an anesthesiologist, collects contemporary art and now has more than 600 pieces, including works by Jean Dubuffet and Cindy Sherman. “Storage is a problem,” he admits. “My two homes are filled. I hang my pictures salon style, and the walls are covered from floor to ceiling. I’ve got things on the sofas, and eight pieces are leaning against the kitchen table.” Even so, he returned from the Art Basel show in Miami last December with nine new purchases.

Some collectors simply create new space. Michael Quinn, a retired radiologist who lives in Coos Bay, Ore., started acquiring Harley-Davidson motorcycles as a college student in 1961. Today he houses his 75 hogs and a few of their Japanese competitors in their own 40-by-60-foot shed, which has concrete flooring and a metal roof. Building the shed, which is near his home, cost Quinn about $50,000. He is still interested in buying more bikes, “but I don’t have room,” he admits. “I’ve had to lose weight just to be able to fit in here.”

TOP VIEW Collecting art, classic vehicles, antiques and other fine objects can provide a lucrative outlet for a passion. But problems—and unexpected expenses—can quickly arise when a collection grows in size and value. Storage, security, insurance and other concerns, if not suitably addressed, can turn a cherished collection into an exasperating burden.

Malcolm Pray, a noted acquirer of vintage cars, began by garaging them at his home in Greenwich, Conn. As the collection expanded to 80 vehicles, he chose to store 40 of them in three new buildings in Banksville, N.Y., on pristine acreage that resembles a horse farm. There, several times a month, Pray invites underprivileged children to see the gleaming autos while he urges them to become entrepreneurs and someday own classic cars. “The response that I get from these kids makes me feel that I have done some good with my collection,” he says.

Any number of art warehouses will store a collector’s overage, but it is important to ask for references from other collectors or even an insurance agent. Collectors need a location with proper security, fire protection, temperature and humidity controls and one that will handle possessions carefully. But even the most careful collector utilizing the most secure warehouse is not invulnerable. In May 2004, fire ripped through 10,000 square feet of London’s Momart warehouse, incinerating much of Charles Saatchi’s famous contemporary art collection. Shane knows he has to start thinking about storing some of his pieces. He went so far as to get references from fellow collectors, but the news of the Momart fire worried him. “That didn’t help,” he admits.

Maintaining a collection at home brings its own difficulties. An individual in Manhattan who displays her collection in her co-op apartment says, “I can’t have a window cleaner come in without two people supervising him, because I have stuff that breaks. Changing a light bulb in my house is a big number.” Yes, she could store her items, but recently she visited a prominent photography collector and was horrified to discover that the collector’s pictures were photographs of the photographs because the originals were in a warehouse. “Why would you want that?” she asks.

When collectors give parties, they often hire well-dressed security guards to mingle with guests to thwart thieves and to keep the overly enthusiastic from pawing the pictures. Susan Seidel, a New York dealer in Impressionist and modern art, remembers that one of her clients had copies made of every picture he owned. Whenever he hosted charity events that drew a crush of people into his home, he always hung the copies. “He would have been appalled at the ostentation of an armed guard in his house,” Seidel says.

Most people would be horrified, but security expert Stevan Layne of Layne Consultants International in Dillon, Colo., says security concerns are often justified. “Thefts from private collections are pretty common, and from art galleries as well,” he says. Most of these losses have an inside component, he notes. Members of a household staff talk to their friends about the beautiful things, and the friends might have less savory friends. “Collectors should screen their employees better and be careful who they let in to see their collections,” Layne suggests.

If the assemblage resides in a house, the collector needs outdoor lights, alarms and strong fences to repel intruders. Front doors should be solid core hardwood or steel with pin tumbler locks that have at least five tumblers, and collectors should remove easily smashed fanlights and side windows; the front door is only as strong as what surrounds it. Inside, security specialists recommend video surveillance and intrusion detection alarms that include shock sensors on the walls and motion sensors. “Your home must be protected like a vault,” Layne says. “You don’t need heavy bank doors, but you do have to protect around the perimeters, doors and windows.” An alarm system that rings into a central station manned by police or a security service is a good idea, as long as response time is less than five minutes.

Although Layne would prefer 24-hour manned coverage within the home, many collectors settle for dogs. Fogel uses a German shepherd in addition to alarms to protect his baseball memorabilia. The dog, he says, “can be a pussycat most of the time, but knows how to separate work from pleasure.” Unfortunately, guard dogs bring their own risks. If a hound takes a hunk out of a trespasser, the interloper can sue the owner, claiming he was on the property accidentally. “Dog bites are not a penalty for art theft,” Layne says.

There are more insidious threats than the two-footed kind. Light destroys prints, humidity wreaks havoc with books, heat cracks furniture, stiletto heels punch holes in carpets. Unless your guests are Japanese, they are likely to balk at removing their shoes before entering your house, but you can mitigate other environmental predators with dehumidifiers or humidifiers, air conditioning and drawn curtains.

Shane protects his contemporary paintings and drawings with ultraviolet-light-blocking film on every window. In coastal Oregon, where motorcycle collector Quinn lives, humidity averages a corrosive 80 percent. Dehumidifiers are not up to the job, so he battles the elements by keeping his shed heated to at least 65 degrees and circulating the air once a day. The Bells’ handicrafts can hide strange bugs, so they carefully examine each of their items once every year and kill off intruders by consigning any infested goods to a 5-degree freezer in their basement. “We have largely given up buying anything made of wool because there’s usually something in it,” Susan Bell explains.

More pedestrian risks threaten in-home collections: burst pipes and kitchen fires. Avoid storing anything valuable in the attic or the basement, says Alissa Stallings, collector services specialist at Chubb Insurance. “Those places are usually not tied into your heating and air conditioning. The basement can flood and pipes can burst in the attic.” Be sure to get your plumbing inspected once a year, and if you must put items in the basement, raise them at least 18 inches off the ground, she advises. Dorit Straus, worldwide specialty fine art manager for Chubb, says, “You want a fire detector—which is almost more important to have than security—smoke and heat sensors; low temperature sensors as well as heat.”

Insurance provides some balm for collector jitters. “It’s more than protecting your investment; insurance is an emotional tranquilizer to protect against the anxiety of having your things stolen,” collector Lerch explains. However, collectors cannot count on a standard homeowner’s policy to cover their pieces adequately; most will not pay to replace items of antiquity, which usually means items more than 25 years old. Collectors can take out separate riders on homeowner’s coverage for jewelry, fine art and other especially valuable items, but in many cases a policy that specifically covers fine arts and valuables serves them better. It should also insure the collectibles during transit.

Prepare to pay a premium, both literally and figuratively, for such coverage. “I pay six figures a year for it,” Fogel points out, “and I don’t think any collector insures everything. If something is in a fireproof safe, what’s the likelihood of anything happening to it?”

As a rough guide, expect to pay 15 cents per $100 of coverage. While initial costs might be nominal, they may skyrocket if the collectibles appreciate. Moreover, premiums are only part of the insurance cost. Before underwriting a multimillion-dollar collection, Chubb’s Straus or one of her colleagues visits the collector’s home or the site of the collection. “We’re usually there to offer our advice,” she explains. “We can survey the security and offer suggestions for improvements.” To which a slightly disgruntled collector responds: “We had to pay for putting in all kinds of security systems we wouldn’t have put in just by ourselves.”

The best way to ensure a smooth claims process, should disaster strike, is to have your goods appraised frequently and to have them cataloged. “I used to say that you should have your collection appraised every three years, but for some pieces the market is so volatile that they should be done more often,” appraiser Rosenberg says. That could mean every year or two in a runaway market. Appraisers can charge as much as $400 an hour. The Appraisers Association of America runs a certification program and can recommend qualified professionals.

Cataloging is a task that gives some collectors a great deal of pleasure; others hire curators to handle it. The Bells have painstakingly itemized 5,500 of their pieces by hand on index cards in small file drawers. There are notations on each card describing the item, when and where they bought it and what they paid, as well as close-up photos of most of their pieces showing their function. At the other end of the spectrum is Shane, who bought his first computer eight years ago to gain control of his expanding collection. He uses antiques management software created by Artsystems to keep track of his works. “I’ve fallen behind in my record keeping,” he admits. “I’ve got a four-month backlog, but I’m picky about putting things in;
I want to do it the right way.”

Software tools like Shane’s permit collectors, or their curators, to enter descriptions of the works, such as any framing, the price paid, the gallery they were purchased from, condition reports, appraisals, provenance, the location of the pieces, biographical information about the artist or maker, information about insurance, photographs and so on. “Value is built on information about the piece,” explains Doug Milford, a partner at New York-based Artsystems. Should the unthinkable happen, the records will provide every piece of information a collector needs to do battle with the insurance company. In fact, many fine-arts insurers offer such systems themselves.

Managing a collection that appreciates is admittedly a problem that many would love to have. But sometimes the added work can cause the objects themselves to lose their enchantment. When this happens, “the nitty-gritty of maintenance becomes a pain in the neck,” says Robert Barron, who in March sold his collection of 65 Song dynasty ceramic pieces at Christie’s in New York. Barron, a retired neurologist who lives in New Orleans, had been collecting Song pottery for more than 40 years when the New Orleans Museum of Art decided to mount an exhibition of his pots in 2000. He visited the show nearly every day until it went traveling to four other museums around the country. “I didn’t see my pots again for a year and a half,” he recalls. “When they came back to New Orleans, I found that I’d lost interest.”

Barron had stored his ceramics, each in its own fitted box, in a locked closet in his home where he could take out several at a time and admire them. But he never insured the collection. When it came back from the tour, which had made it famous, he realized he would have security problems if he continued storing it at home. The New Orleans museum offered him storage, and he was happy to accept. After the collection spent two years in the museum’s basement, during which time he never visited it, he knew the time had come to sell. “I don’t miss the pots; I’ll always love them in retrospect,” he says. “I hope the buyers will love them as much as I did.”

Illustration by Tim Bower.

Julie Connelly is a writer based in New York. julieconnelly@msn.com.