Investment special: Sell your Ferraris

Here is a paradox. Study the photographs of the flats and houses being sold in London’s prime property boom and you see one minimalist interior after another. The huge, empty sweeps of marble and limestone, broken only by a solitary painting, might give you the impression that it is fashionable to declutter your life. One can imagine one of those H.M. Bateman cartoons portraying the shock and horror generated by the man who placed an ornament on his mantelpiece.

Why, then, if we are so keen to get rid of all the clutter, has the price of luxury goods mushroomed over the past decade? Chinese ceramics, the collectable sort, that is — are up 83 per cent, jewellery up 146 per cent, art up 183 per cent. Antique watches – yes, at a time when high-street sales of watches are plummeting due to people using their phones to tell the time instead — are up 83 per cent. Coins and stamps, which you might imagine to be the preserve of dusty provincial museums, are up 225 per cent and 255 per cent respectively.

Strangest of all, in some respects, is the boom in classic cars. Never mind that the wealthy are increasingly living in urban apartments with miserable underground car parks rather than country houses with coach houses. Never mind the fashion for hiring Zip cars by the hour rather than owning our own vehicles and all the fuss that goes with them. Cars have become the investment bubble which inflated while few of us were really looking. Prices of classic cars, according to the Historic Automobile Group Index (HAGI), are up 430 per cent over the decade. Forty-six per cent of that rise has come in the past 12 months.