Last weekend we went to the Mullin Automotive Museum in Oxnard. It's a private museum only open twice a month with reservations in advance. I've been wanting to check it out for a while now but finding a day when its open that fits into our schedule hasn't been easy.
The museum collection contains French Art Deco cars and furniture. The furniture was alright, interesting but not some of the classic American or English styles we like. The cars on the other hand were pretty amazing.
These are all French cars made in the late 1920s and 30s before WWII and back when French cars were highly desirable (who'd a guessed). They are all made in the carriage tradition, were a customer would come in and buy the chassis and then work with a carriage builder to design the car and pick out the colors and interior.
We were lucky enough to take the first tour, which was led by the head museum curator, Andrew Reilly. He was excellent and walked through everything from the point of view of the museum, why this collection and what he wanted to portray by setting things up the way he did. The tour lasted 2 1/2 hrs and flew by. The only reason we noticed it was getting late was because our stomachs started to get hungry.
We got to see a lot of the interiors and he did cover a lot of the different cars, the new technology being used and why they did certain things the way they did. These cars were all for the 1% of society who could actually afford them and you can see the craftsmanship in each and every one.
This one however was quite unique. This is a 1938 Bugatti Atlantic, 1 of 3 produced and is the most expensive car in the world. It's on loan to the museum and was purchased at a closed auction for somewhere between 30 and 40 million dollars, yes that is million.
It was amazing!
The race cars were awesome too. Down stairs were all the cars and on the second floor were all the race cars.
The collection was far beyond anything we had imagined and having a tour with the curator just made it all the more interesting. One of the cars had just won at Pebble Beach and many of the other cars had won in past years. It definitely gave us a new appreciation for Art Deco cars and the French tradition of building of them.
