Phillips Design Auction Results Scraper

Scrape auction results for all Phillips Design sales — lot details, estimates, hammer prices, provenance, and images across New York, London, Hong Kong, and Geneva sales back to 2008.

What it does

This actor crawls phillips.com and extracts structured data for every lot sold in a Phillips Design auction. It covers the full Design department catalog — from the founding 2008 New York sales through current Hong Kong, London, and Geneva results.

For each lot you get:

• Lot identification — lot ID, sale ID, lot number, lot URL
• Sale metadata — sale title, location (NY / London / HK / Geneva / Berlin), date
• Object details — title, designer, manufacturer, country of origin, date of design, dimensions, materials, edition, signed/marked notes
• Provenance record — provenance, literature, exhibited
• Pricing — estimate low/high, currency, hammer price, price realized (with buyer's premium), sold/passed flag
• Images — pipe-separated list of high-resolution image URLs

Phillips Design auctions are the global benchmark for contemporary collectible design (Wendell Castle, Marc Newson, Zaha Hadid, Studio Job, R & Y Augousti). The site publishes fully structured per-lot data that is absent from every major auction aggregator.

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
maxItems	integer	10	Maximum number of lot records to scrape. Set to a large number (e.g. 50000) to get the full historical catalog.

Output

Each record in the dataset corresponds to one auction lot:

{
  "lot_id": "NY050325-0041",
  "sale_id": "NY050325",
  "sale_title": "Design New York",
  "sale_location": "New York",
  "sale_date": "2025-05-03",
  "lot_number": "41",
  "title": "Chaise Longue LC4",
  "designer": "Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret, Charlotte Perriand",
  "manufacturer": "Cassina",
  "country_of_origin": "Italy",
  "date_of_design": "1928",
  "dimensions": "67 × 160 × 58 cm",
  "materials": "Chrome-plated steel, pony skin",
  "signed_marked": "Stamped 'CASSINA'",
  "edition": "",
  "provenance": "Private Collection, Paris",
  "literature": "",
  "exhibited": "",
  "estimate_low": 8000,
  "estimate_high": 12000,
  "currency": "USD",
  "hammer_price": 10000,
  "price_realized": 12700,
  "is_sold": true,
  "image_urls": "https://dist.phillips.com/auction-assets/NY050325/NY050325-0041-Main.jpg|https://dist.phillips.com/auction-assets/NY050325/NY050325-0041-Detail.jpg",
  "lot_url": "https://www.phillips.com/detail/le-corbusier-pierre-jeanneret-charlotte-perriand/NY050325/41"
}

Note: image_urls is a pipe-separated string of URLs. Split on | to get the list.

How it works

The actor uses a three-level hierarchical crawl:

1. Index page — phillips.com/auctions/past?department=design returns a 7 MB page with the full Design auction database embedded as a React component. The actor extracts and parses this JSON to discover all Design sales (157+ sales back to 2008).

2. Sale pages — Each sale's lot listing page is crawled to discover individual lot URLs.

3. Lot detail pages — Each lot page embeds structured auction data in the React Router streaming format. The actor parses this flight data to extract all fields without needing a headless browser.

No proxy is required — Phillips.com returns data to standard HTTP requests with a realistic User-Agent.

Use cases

• Insurance appraisal — Current and historical price benchmarks for Phillips Design lots
• Gallery and dealer research — Track sale results for specific designers or manufacturers
• Museum provenance research — Full provenance, literature, and exhibition records
• Market analysis — Price trends across Design auction categories and geographies
• Collection valuation — Realized prices with buyer's premium for comparable works

Notes

• Results are ordered by sale (most recent first) within the maxItems cap. Set maxItems to a very large number to get all historical lots.
• Hammer prices and prices realized are in the currency of the sale (currency field: USD, GBP, HKD, CHF).
• price_realized includes buyer's premium; hammer_price is the net hammer price before premium.
• Passed lots (unsold) have is_sold: false and null pricing fields.