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Tim Durham Collection
Whatever He Likes
How to park anything you like with dignity and luxury.
by Phil Berg
This ‘37 Cord 812 is a “Sportsman” with a rumbleseat and footsteps on its rear fenders. Right: This Auburn Boattail Speedster is an award-winning original.
There’s a lot of extra space in Tim Durham’s 45-car home garage these days, mostly because his Ford GT likely spends more time at the airport waiting for him to drive it home, hopefully in-between snowfalls in Indianapolis. Across the country in restoration shops are his BMW 507, a Cord, an Aston DB5 (“Every guy is a fan of James Bond”) and an Auburn, and directing the full restorations of the group is not too much of a mental burden for Durham, he says. After all, when we visited his home garage he was in the middle of buying and selling 20 separate companies. It’s what the math whiz and former corporate attorney is very good at these days.
“I’ve got so many cars going on right now, but you never know what might come along that you like. I multi-task well, I guess,” says the well-known native investor from Indiana.
Notably missing from the group of nearly 40 cars—all plugged into Battery Tenders on the granite-floor, two-level garage—are Ferraris. There is just one example, a recent Stradale semi-racecar. “I think Ferraris are the most beautiful cars designed. I have the Diablo, the Porsche, the Aston Vanquish, but I just didn’t like the Enzo. I have friends, one has three Enzos, and he’s starting to bring me around. The more I talk to him, the more I appreciate the cars. But I bought what I did just because I like them. I go to shows with friends, and we educate each other about our cars.”
As a child, Durham had a collection of Matchbox toy cars, the “Models of Yesteryear” series that included such cars as spoke-wheeled Rolls-Royce Phantoms and 1910 Benz Limousines. In his small hometown of Seymour, Indiana, there was an old gas station that had a few dust-coated Model As and Model Ts that were in various stages of repair. “I would go by that station everyday as a 12-year-old and see those cars in there. I asked the old man who owned them if he’d sell them to me, and he said no. I kept asking him, and he never let me buy them. I couldn’t stand that they were just going to disappear into nothing.”
 In addition to his sympathy for classics, and his passion for some, but not all, supercars, “I like luxury cars new or old,” he adds. “It’s the elegant look that I really like.” Durham has run vintage rallies such as the London-Brighton re-creation. He has a sticker festooned Saleen Mustang with radar jammer antennae hidden in the front grille that he ran in a cross-country Great American Run, a 61-mph average-speed highway rally. Like most driving fans, once his cars have been at a show, he drives them. “Cars are for driving,” Durham says, but he doesn’t abuse them—he keeps them clean, in top mechanical shape. “I try to improve them. It’s like a duty. I’m just the guy who happens to be taking care of these cars now. They belong to history, not to me,” he says.
The lower floor of the garage has a separate single-stall work bay, but it is set up as a detailer’s dream space, with wall-level lights and portable floodlights to check for microscratches in the paint. It’s not an easy job, since most of Durham’s cars are black. The very clean MGA and the early stock Pontiac Solstice are both black, too, but Durham won’t let his detailer at these cars for a simple reason: “If they spend 60 hours at a time making these cars perfect, that costs more than the cars are worth.”
To build the massive attached garage he had envisioned, he began looking for a house with lots of space around it. About five years ago he found this site. “I walked the property. I had a vision of being able to build this garage and match it to the house. Like the cars, I like luxury. I remodeled the house, too. I just like timeless luxury, the thick wood floors, the look of the house.”
 The third floor of the garage contains a large guest apartment, a full-screen theater and entertainment room, a lounge with a circular bar and a large modern pool table, with dormer windows looking out over the property’s adjacent lake. Then, through a door off this lounge, there’s a library and pub that seems heavily inspired by the same room in the William Randolph Hearst Castle, where Durham once was allowed to drive his ex-Hearst Duesenberg up the winding driveway.Parked next to his spotless Auburn Boattail, his other Auburns, his Duesenberg, Cord, and Packard, are also some orphans: “My son saw the DeLorean and said ‘we’ve got to have that.’ I just liked the Solstice, and the Jaguars.” He also has replicas: a Auburn Boattail, a Mercedes SL Gullwing, and a radically chopped ’40 Lincoln Zephyr street rod. He also has a BMW-powered Monza Spyder built by Milt Brown of Apollo fame.
“I take the cars to all the shows because people like to see them. I’m bad at shows because I don’t like getting up early,” Durham explains, so he sometimes misses appointments with judges. “The silver Duesenberg is the most beautiful car in the world, but I never won an award for it. I have a houseful of trophies,” he adds, “but I don’t really know what they’re for.” We know: They represent all the folks that have as much appreciation for his cars as Durham has. 
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