People often tell me they want to "start collecting" as if it were a door you walk through. It is closer to a habit. You look, you learn what you keep returning to, you buy something, and you live with it long enough to find out whether you were right. A collection is what those decisions look like after a few years, if they were made with some consistency.

Where to begin

Look before you buy. Museums, galleries, art fairs, artists' studios, and not only the ones in your city. Keep a note of what stopped you. After a month the note has a pattern in it: a medium, a scale, a mood, a period. That pattern is the beginning of your taste, and taste is the only thing that makes a collection more than an inventory.

Then buy one work. Not the safest, not the most expensive, the one you will be glad to see every day. Hang it well. Live with it. The second purchase will be better because of the first.

The best first purchases I have seen are the ones that carry something of the buyer's life. For a home in Ramat Gan, a client came back from a transformative trip to Korea, and a large format photograph by a Korean artist of two figures in ceremonial dress now sits at the heart of the living space. It gives the room memory. That is the kind of work a collection grows from.

The mistakes I see most often

• Buying for the wall instead of the work. A painting chosen to match the sofa is furniture. It will leave with the sofa.
• Buying names without looking. A known artist has weak works too. Provenance, condition and where the piece sits in the artist's career matter as much as the signature.
• Paying the first price. Prices in the art market are negotiated far more often than newcomers assume. Walking in alone, without market knowledge, means paying more than you need to.
• Keeping no records. Invoices, certificates, condition reports, correspondence with the gallery. A collection without a paper trail is hard to insure, hard to lend and hard to sell.
• Rushing. The fair closes on Sunday, the dealer says someone else is interested. Good collections are rarely built under that kind of pressure.

What an advisor adds

Access, first. An extensive network of artists, galleries and makers means you see works that never reach the public market, and you see them early. Then judgment: fourteen years of curatorial work in museums, managing a gallery in Tel Aviv and building collections for hotels teach you to tell a strong work from a fashionable one. Then the market: what a work should cost, when to negotiate, and how direct relationships with artists often bring the total cost of the work itself down.

Finally, coherence. A collection built one impulse at a time looks like it. An advisor holds the thread across years, so that the twentieth work belongs with the first, and manages the parts nobody enjoys: shipping, framing, installation.

On fees, the advisory industry generally works on an hourly rate, a flat project fee, a percentage of acquisitions, or a retainer for ongoing collection work. I quote each project after a first conversation, based on scope. More on that in what an art advisor costs.

From one work to a collection: two projects

For a private collector in Caesarea, I sourced large scale works from France, layered pigments with 18k gold detailing, in close collaboration with a leading gallery. I handled the price negotiations and gave guidance aligned with the collector's taste and long term investment goals. Taste came first, always. A work you do not love is a bad investment even when the price goes up.

In Closter, New Jersey, a newly built private residence needed a collection rather than a single work. Working closely with leading New York City galleries, I brought together works by Jewish and Israeli artists alongside other contemporary voices, so that the house would have one voice on its walls rather than many. Three works hang as a group above the dining table, one painting carries the office alone, and the hall has the work in the photograph at the top of this page. Each piece was chosen for its wall, and the walls were chosen for what they could hold.

A first step

If you are ready to buy your first serious work, or you have five works and want to find out whether they are becoming a collection, write to me. Send a few photos of what you own and what you have been drawn to. The first conversation is where I find out what you love, and that is where every collection starts. If you want to understand how a project runs from there, read how the process works.