Something a Little Luxurious
Harking back to the glories of steam travel and daring do behind the wheel, Tim Bent’s store is an Aladdin’s cave of the unusual and refined
Article by Stuart Husband
“This is where the magic happens,” grins Tim Bent, rolling up the shutters on his small-but-perfectly-formed store at the edge of the Pimlico Road design district in London. And Bentleys is indeed an alluring prospect for anyone who hearkens after the glamour of the golden age of travel and the refined accoutrements that facilitated it. Here, set off resplendently by walls clad in water hyacinth-hued rush matting, you’ll find vintage luggage, from 1920s Louis Vuitton and Goyard steamer trunks capacious enough to contain whole wardrobes (as they probably did, when they were hoisted on board the Lusitania or similar) to leather Gladstone bags; you’ll marvel at aeronautica and automobilia, from an F4 Phantom ejector seat and a model Concorde on a chrome stand to a silver cigarette case fashioned after a Mercedes Benz radiator grille and various pairs of goggles that could have been modelled by the store’s nominative antecedents, roaring 20s tearaways the Bentley Boys; you’ll covet a World War 1-era brass telescope fashioned after an artillery gun, or some croc-skin binoculars; and you’ll find it hard to resist the whimsical accessories, from a table cigar lighter crafted from Indian blackbuck antelope horn to a set of bronze “weightlifting” frogs, bearing a pair of candlesticks and an inkwell.
Bentleys’ idiosyncratic charm – even among the rarefied precincts of Pimlico Road, it stands out for its leather-and-gunsmoke-colonial-gents’-club-meets-Wes-Anderson-movie-set vibe – is a tribute to its proprietor and his magpie eye. With his well-cut double-breasted workwear jacket, unruly hair, and enthused-boffin air, Tim Bent resembles an Anderson character – it’s easy to imagine him jumping on board the Darjeeling Limited wielding a monogrammed Vuitton courier trunk – with all the attendant obsessions. “The objects that kicked all this off were two old Gladstone bags of my grandfather’s that I found in his attic,” he says. “I spent days polishing them and cleaning them, and then sold one of them – I kept getting stopped in the street and being asked where I’d got them. That’s when I got the bug for buying and restoring luggage.”
Tim comes from solid retailing stock – his parents ran a chain of women’s fashion emporia in his native East Anglia – and he founded Bentleys in 1989. “My collections had started to accrete a few years before that, when you could buy English leather suitcases for nothing,” he says. “People were just throwing them out. There were a number of great finds in skips and a lot of fighting with grannies for premium jumble-sale treasures. It was great for me, because I could get the business going with very little capital outlay. And even though it became a commercially viable proposition, that was never my prime intention. It’s really total indulgence. In my eyes, there’s no better way of spending your life than running around discovering new old things.”
Tim credits Ralph Lauren and Evelyn Waugh with spurring Bentleys’ initial success. “Ralph Lauren commercialised the whole aesthetic we deal in, and made it a market that people understood,” he says (Lauren once came in and bought a set of croc-skin cases, leaving the normally unflappable Tim a little starstruck). Meanwhile, he continues, the classic Jeremy Irons-Antony Andrews TV adaptation of Brideshead Revisited ushered in a vogue for exquisite early-to-mid-20th-century antiques. But Bentleys also has a strong analogue streak in a digital world; customers are encouraged to experience the objects first-hand. “Our website is integral to our business, of course,” says Tim. “But I love the tactility of this stuff. When someone comes in, we throw open the cabinets and get them to hold the things and feel their warp and weave and weft, look at the patina in daylight rather than a photograph, and share in our knowledge and our enthusiasms. There are no subtleties to buying online. I love the idea of building displays in the shop and grouping things together. It’s an immersion in a different world; you step off the street and into an atmosphere and a feeling that you remember.”
Tactile joys notwithstanding, the internet has irrevocably changed the way Tim, and Bentleys, does business. Fifteen years ago, he says, with the advent of eBay, the market was flooded with “amazing stuff,” including a Vuitton trunk that once belonged to William Randolph Hearst that he snapped up “out of someone’s attic.” But now, he continues, “it’s a very commercial world, with no personality – and the joy of the antiques world is that it’s about people and their joys and obsessions.” Don’t get him wrong, he adds – he buys online, “though there’s still nothing like the thrill of being out on the road,” and he’s on Instagram, “mainly re-posting images from these amazing Japanese leather craftsmen.” One effect of the internet has been that trend cycles have got shorter – “there’s great interest at the moment in aeronautical things and texture, and the Chinese have already gone beyond the monogrammed Vuitton stuff and onto the damier pattern. But our objects aren’t about immediacy; they require decades of commitment and appreciation, and that seems to be part of a counter-intuitive mindset that goes along with the blossoming vintage car market at places like Goodwood Revival. People appreciate things that are heavy, strong, and beautifully-built, whether it’s a folio, a cigar case, or a Vuitton or Goyard trunk.”
With private museums now being built to showcase the latter, does Tim feel that there’s anything out there left to discover? “Oh, there’s always something,” he grins. “But you have to go rummage around in the markets, and trek around the country looking for those interesting auction pieces that are no longer going to Christie’s or Sotheby’s. Legwork is critical. You need to build a friendship with dealers where they share their knowledge, and they’re excited to show you something you’ve never seen before, with a story behind it. That’s largely how it still works.”
That’s certainly the modus operandi at Bentleys. Tim likes to relate how Candace Bushnell, author of Sex & the City, once called in: “She said, ‘But the shop’s full of things that no-one would ever need.’ And that’s exactly the point. We’re not about necessity, but desire.” To emphasize the point, he recalls one of his best buys: “A pair of 1920s Hermès driving gloves that had indicators on the cuffs, where little sensors in the fingers would indicate whether you intended to turn left or right, and there was a red one for braking. You’d stick these immaculate leather gauntlets out of the window of your town car to let people know which way you were turning.” He beams. “An obvious one-off, made on someone’s whim, where budget was immaterial.” Eccentric luxury, imbued with jet-set style; that’s Bentleys’ own indubitable kind of magic. 
Enquiries: Bentleys, 91 Lower Sloane Street, London SW1W 8DA / 0207 7506852 / [email protected] / http://bentleyslondon.com/