While the company had no specific plans to hold auctions in Sydney, at least for the time being, it would be looking for leakage of consignments from the northern state to its rooms in South Yarra, he said.
Ms Phillips has already secured a collection of 92 clocks covering the period 1880 to 1920 which has been shipped south and is being sold by Leonard Joel this week, he added.
Premises in the eastern suburbs, either in Double Bay or Rushcutters Bay, with a facility for showing at least parts of consignments made to Leonard Joel's Melbourne rooms were being looked at and a rental agreement was expected to be signed shortly.
Costs would not be allowed to blow out, Mr Albrecht told Terry Ingram for the Australian Art Sales Digest. While Ms Phillips' speciality has been paintings, easily transportable items such as jewellery were being targeted.
It seems Ms Phillips is the obvious choice for this sortie into NSW as she joined Tim Goodman's Bay East in 2003 and ran it until 2011 when it was temporarily rebadged as Leonard Joel.
In the turmoil of the transformation of Bonhams and Goodman (as it had become) into Sotheby's Australia and its morphing into a top end only operator, the new badge was dropped. "Bay East" was accepted as a highly successful brand but Sotheby's stepped back from the operation in 2012 and it disappeared from view.
The Sydney operation will be looking for some of the objects which Bay East would have sold especially in the picture department.
"I'm surprised with what I hear that Sotheby's Australia has turned away," Mr Albrecht said.
The company, with a special link to Melbourne's traditional market, certainly would not have said "no" to the watercolour Central Station Brisbane (despite the subject's location) which Theodore Bruce sold in its rooms in Beaconsfield in a Sunday art sale (rather like the Sunday art sales held periodically by Leonard Joel) on July 21.
It made $12,000 plus 20 per cent buyers premium (total $14,400) against estimates of $5000 to $7000) to a bidder on the phone after bounding over a top estimate of $8000.
The seductively purple toned picture had never been sold before. It had been a gift from the artist to a member of the same family, the Hattersleys, during the artist's lifetime.
Coincidentally Bruce's is also an operation in Sydney bearing the name of an interstate operator. Theodore Bruce bears the name of one of Adelaide's oldest auction houses.
Goodman's had a house sale, rich in traditional art for th Hattersely family, whose name enjoyed a certain familiarity through the Sydney stock brokerage firm of Hattersley and Maxwell, in the mid-noughties.
If Mr Albrecht signs a lease in the Boundary Street area of Rushcutters Bay it will be near Sydney antique dealer Mr Martyn Cook's proposed new space. Mr Cook is moving out of the former Redfern electricity exchange building after selling it for a reputed $5 million.
With silver lent for the occasion, members of the Australian Antique and Art Dealers Association of NSW held its annual dinner and 50th anniversary celebrations there on July 25, presided over by Mr Hartley Cook, Sydney dealer son of Mr Peter Cook, who was one of the leading light's in the association's formation.
The association, originally heavily involved in brown furniture, has survived a membership drift caused by the switch to minimalism and the "look" that is decorative objects made desirable through their appearance, rather than their age.
Its membership has been sustained by the courting of art dealers to join and the extension of its name to cover them.
Only one member has ever been asked to resign and he was last reported to be living in Britain. The longest serving member, Mr Bill Blinco, was at the dinner after a membership stretching back to the earliest years.
One of the association's former greats, Mr Paul Kenny who came to attention through an association with collector Mr Paul Keating and a "Thai teak table" acquired for the Lodge in Canberra, was not present. Mr Kenny has been ill.
Mr Warwick Oakman who tried to radically modernise the association but who left in despair was also not there.
Another former member and brief exhibitor at its fairs, Mr John Pettit, was also absent. The bank notes he dealt in are now part of an administration matter due to Mr Pettit's financial misfortunes.
These have been heightened by the recent collapse of a rare bank note seller in Albany, Western Australia. Bank notes once valued at up to $200 million are now in limbo and wheat farmers and others who put them into their superannuation fund will have difficulty reaping any returns.
Small quantities of lesser material from the Pettit voluntary administration have been awaited by Downie's of Melbourne, while rare international bank notes are expected to be consigned to Spink in London. Buyers from Mr Pettit at past AAADA fairs are less likely to be hurt by his collapse because their market was not driven by speculators.
The AAADA annual Sydney fair at the Randwick Racecourse will be held from August 21 to 25 with new member Hordern House tipped to exhibit a replica of an object in a public collection in a project involving $1.5 million and a pot.
It will show just how far the market has changed if the replica turns heads at the fair, as reproductions and copies were once frowned upon by the old guard of the antique trade.
However, the Art Gallery of NSW produced a cast of Bertram Mackennal's Circe to raise funds and Viscount Linley showed his very contemporary furniture at the Grosvenor House Antiques Fair long before 1940s furniture became fashionable collectibles.
The item in question is thought to be the Sydney Punch Bowl but the project is very hush-hush as the partners, the State Library of NSW and Hordern House, obviously would prefer to place it in the usual metropolitan newspaper cycle that such marketing ventures are best suited to.
AASD understands that the price will be equivalent to that asked by some of the members of the association for classy original antiques.
The original bowl was presented to the Mitchell Library in 1926 by the Sydney antiques dealer W. A. Little who acquired it through the London rare book dealership of Francis Edwards.
The bowl bears a hand painted scenic view image from the eastern shore of Sydney Cove where present day East Circular Quay is located.
An elongated two-storey stone building is in the foreground. It is the sandstone cottage built by Governor Macquarie for his favourite boatman, the Jamaican-born convict Billy Blue.
A twin to the punch bowl was located in Newark in New Jersey by the Australian Financial Review's Saleroom correspondent in the 1990s and subsequently acquired for the Australian National Maritime Museum by curator Mr Paul Hundley who has since been snapped up by one of the new museums in Qatar.
