Fifty-Seventh Street has long been a mainstay for gallery-hopping. Soon it will be the home of a major auction house as well.

Yesterday, London-based auctioneers Bonhams announced it will be opening a branch on gallery row. The aggressively growing auctioneer has taken a space on the sixth floor of the Fuller Building, at 57th and Fifth Avenue, a building already brimming with gallery tenants. They will be renovating and hope to open their 5,000-square-foot office and auction room by springtime. The space will hold traveling exhibitions and auction previews for the design, painting, and jewelry auctions the firm plans to mount in 2005.

Bonhams, with salesrooms in San Francisco and Los Angeles, as well as in the U.K., Europe, and Australia, tested out the New York market last December. On December 15, Bonhams sold $1.24 million in 20th-century furniture and decorative arts from an adhoc auction room set up at the Flatotel on West 52nd Street.

Bonhams was founded in London in 1793 when the city was littered with emporia. Recently, the firm has been rapidly expanding, led by 45-year-old chairman Robert Brooks, who drives race cars when he’s not growing the Bonhams empire. The firm calls itself “the world’s fastest growing auction house,” and it doesn’t seem an exaggeration.

Mr. Brooks, a former Christie’s auctioneer, started up Brooks Auctioneers in 1989 to sell vintage cars. In 2000, together with a partner, he bought Bonhams, which gave him a much broader range of sales categories, from books to paintings. That same year, he made a deal with luxury retailer LVMH Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy, which was eager to offload the London branch of Phillip’s auction house. This gave Bonhams more staff, more experts, and a beachhead on New Bond Street.

In 2002, Brooks bought Butterfield’s, an established West Coast house, from online seller eBay, which was said to have vastly overpaid for the bricksand-mortar Los Angeles and San Francisco auctioneer, reportedly paying around $260 million. Mr. Brooks’s good timing means he probably paid reasonably low prices for these companies. In 2003, Mr. Brooks continued the buying spree, acquiring Goodman’s, an Australian auctioneer. The net result of all these mergers is a company that says it holds 700 sales a year. New York is just the latest frontier it aims to tackle.

“New York is halfway between California and Europe,” said Bonhams Vice President John King, who is director of the New York office. “New York is a very viable auction center.”