Ivor Braka: a rock 'n' roll art dealer

His choices as an art dealer were equally contrary. 'I was following my own judgement,' Braka explains. 'I still am.' But suddenly his judgement began to look courageous. He was buying and selling 1970s Minimalism, notably Carl Andre, Donald Judd and Mangold, early. He got into Francis Bacon and Frank Auerbach well before the pack, and David Bomberg and Stanley Spencer. It was hit and miss but soon the hits began to overshadow the misses. How did he spot the importance of Bacon, Auerbach and Freud so early? He shrugs. 'I studied them at Oundle in the 1960s. They were household names to me. But they were new information to the commercial market, which was very slow to catch on. I was not smart, my rivals were stupid.'

He felt no love for the job - not for a long time. 'I loved the art but not the deal. It took 15 years before I enjoyed that. The deal is the essence of our business. The game - the Machiavellianism of it, the hide and seek, the placing of things, the selling them on, sometimes at a loss, sometimes at multiple profits - it did not interest me then and does not much interest me now.'

But he proved unexpectedly good at it. Ivor's break came in 1989 when the Bond Street dealer Thomas Gibson introduced him to a terrifying 6ft 8in Swede, Bo Alveryd, who ran an art fund called the Roc Group, and spent $200 million on an eight-week shopping spree in London.

Gibson told Braka to meet him at 6am. Alveryd showed up at 7am, thrust out a paw and announced: 'We're gonna be friends.' It was Ivor's beautiful day. He produced his Francis Bacon self-portrait, which he had bought with Gibson for $2 million (those were the days), and asked $4.2 million for it. 'Not bad,' Ivor declared, waving at the picture. Alveryd is a man hardwired to disagree with all humanity. 'No,' he thundered, 'it is a masterpiece. You will have the money on Tuesday.' Braka, with his laid-back manner, had made the big breakthrough. 'Thomas did a dance,' he remembers.

Ivor was set up. He was an independent from the outset - though he often bought pictures in this high-priced market in partnership with Mayfair colleagues such as Gibson. Rich men, moving pictures from country to country, demand discretion and Ivor's special-appointment, ultra-private act had high appeal. Only Lady Angela Nevill and Billy Keating in Chelsea and James Kirkman in Brompton Square were doing anything comparable.

By 2001, when Bacon prices began their mountainous climb - from $5 million to $86.3 million in seven years --Braka had been two decades in the Bacon market. He knew the pictures, the owners, the collectors and where the bones were buried. It was the same with Freud and Auerbach. These last four years he has confidently bought and sold for record prices.

But to uncover the other side of Ivor Braka you need to leave Chelsea and take the train north from Norwich to Gunton Park. Here is Braka the Norfolk landowner and the rebuilder of a Gilpin/Repton landscape, ruined by EUhappy farmers in the 1980s. Here he works to restore a Georgian park surrounding Matthew Brettingham's 1742 Palladian house. He was alerted to the crisis by Marcus Binney and Kit Martin of SAVE Britain's Heritage. Trees have been replanted in locations marked on 18thcentury maps. The Great Water has been filled. Avenues have been cut, park railings remade, power lines buried. Red and fallow deer have been reintroduced to the park. Ivor and his new wife Sarah Graham, a 35-year-old botanical artist, live in the Observatory near the estate gates. Sarah makes large pictures high up in Gunton Tower, a fantastic sky-climbing folly crowned by a flag on an immense pole. Its giant windows overlook their noble triumph over 20th-century destruction, a project for which Ivor and Kit Martin have won an award from Country Life.

Is he a different person here? I ask this new Braka, who storms across fields in his 4x4 to check up on lonely stags. 'My life is a balance,' he responds. Gunton looks less like a balance than a vocation. He lives quietly here - more quietly than in Chelsea, where the four parties he throws a year attract a wide variety of people from Stella McCartney to the Marquess of Cholmondeley. He is also a pal of David Cameron. He has many glamorous female friends, but insists he was never a playboy. Oh really? Many assumed that if you couldn't get Ivor on the phone in the 1970s it was because he was in bed and the walls were shaking. 'I've never gone out with loads of different women,' he insists.

In 1991 he married Camilla Davidson, daughter of Persimmon Homes owner Duncan Davidson, and by her has a son, Joseph, now 12. Ivor and Camilla were together for seven years. The idea that he has flitted from flower to flower since they parted is wrong, he says. Rather, a large number of his exgirlfriends were older than him, like the Marchioness of Northampton (Fritzi) in the 1990s, so Sarah marks a change of taste, explained perhaps by love at first sight.

They met this year on a skiing holiday and were married in September. By then Ivor had a second son, Jack (by Elizabeth de Stanford), now aged four, who lives with Ivor and Sarah.

Observers might call it a charmed life, but Ivor would hate that. 'It's my Middle Eastern heritage. The minute you call yourself lucky you invite disaster. Growing up, we never celebrated anything; my father thought it would cause Allah displeasure.' So not charmed, not lucky.

But a life lived according to the philosophy that truth is all and convention stands in the way of it, and that what goes up must come down, and vice versa. No wonder he understands the art market so well.