That’s Julia Milley’s sales patter as she welcomes another would-be customer to Central Art Gallery in Beach St which she’s owned for 26 years.
Now 64, she’s still in the shop every day — "I probably do 80 hours a week here" — apart from Christmas Day.
She also has an "unpaid fulltime job" running Queenstown Cat Rescue — and very often spends time helping people in various ways.
Nowadays a Queenstown identity, Julia’s lived here since she was about 23, but is damn near a local.
Though raised in Invercargill, around the late 1940s her father and grandfather built a former boarding house, called Days Off, in Lake Esplanade, and in the early ’60s her dad built a house in Weaver St where she and her family spent every weekend and holiday.
"I used to wander in town when I was four collecting fizzy bottles and cashing them in at the shops."
Julia left Southland Girls’ at 16 and did the likes of cheffing and running supermarkets and dairies.
After arriving in Queenstown she worked for Gus Watson and his Sound and Light Museum and at his maze where roughly Kiwi Park is now.
She’s heard from a customer how he and his mates used a periscope from Skyline "to look down on this chick sunbathing naked at the bottom of the maze".
She was dining room manager at The Mountaineer for many years, and got her first taste of art working for Glenorchy artist Annette Thomson’s Beach St gallery.
About 1993, Julia, who by then had a daughter, Chelsea, was heading to the Earnslaw to apply for a job when she wandered into Barry Wills’ Central Art Gallery.
He asked if she’d mind the shop while he went for lunch.
"I think I sold a painting so I was offered a job."
Come ’98 she’d bought the gallery, but a year later it was under water after a record flood — "I tried frantically to move the art to higher ground without much luck".
In 2002, she bought her current house in blue-chip Dalefield.
The rumour mill said she’d won Lotto or benefited from a drug deal, but she says what happened is she hosted a massive weekend exhibition for then-Auckland-based artist, the late Tim Wilson, which gave her enough for a deposit.
"People started coming in before they were hung, and I literally sold out before the exhibition opened."
She notes her biggest sale, on another occasion, was the resale of a Tim Wilson painting for $220,000.
Julia says after moving to Dalefield she found feral cats everywhere.
"I was catching them and getting them desexed and Geoff [Woodhouse] at Remarkable Vets said, ‘why don’t you start a cat rescue [group]?"’
He put her in touch with Ruth de Reus and they set up Queenstown Cat Rescue in 2009.
"We cleaned up the Dalefield area and then just carried on doing the rest of [the Whakatipu]."
Cat rescue takes up every minute of her spare time, Julia says.
"It isn’t unusual to get phone calls at 4am telling me about a cat on the road and cats fighting outside someone’s bedroom window."
She’s also often looking for cat fosterers — "We’re real short right now".
Meanwhile, Julia’s seen off a lot of rival galleries — "in Beach St alone I can count over 30 galleries that have set up and closed" — but says she doesn’t mind sending customers to others if she doesn’t have what they’re after.
She represents 90-plus artists and has 1000-plus paintings cluttering her gallery.
"I only bring in art I really love or would be happy to hang on my own wall.
"I have an up-to-date website and a mailing list with thousands of clients from all over the world."
Walk-in business, however, has been "incredibly quiet" since Covid.
Her philosophy’s to be 100% honest with her customers.
Julia says "I think they will have to drag me out of the gallery as I have no plans to retire".
Working among "so much beauty", she says, gives her a purpose in life, and she loves people — "it’s never really been about the money, I mean I give a lot away".
As if she isn’t busy enough, she’s been Meals on Wheels president for 30-plus years and runs Facebook groups including a health anxiety page.
As for Queenstown, which she knew when about 350 people lived here, "when people say there’s too many people and houses, I say ‘the things that count haven’t changed"’.
