Paul Potratz.
I just wanted to drive a Defender. Every day.
My father had a repair and restoration shop. I grew up in it.
He taught me one thing about machines that I forgot for a while and have since remembered.
When you try to make a vehicle into something it is not, you spend the rest of your life working on it. It was never engineered to be what you are trying to make it.
I did not understand what that meant until much later.
I have loved these trucks for a long time.
Over the years I have owned multiple Land Rover Discoverys, Range Rovers, and Defenders. The shape. The sound. The way one looks in the woods, in the parking lot of a nice restaurant, or driving down the road. The Defender in particular. There is a way it sits that no modern vehicle can imitate. And there is a feeling that comes with driving one that has nothing to do with horsepower or specifications.
What I am drawn to is a Defender that feels British and considered. Restrained on the exterior, never forced. On the interior, something closer to an English library or a cigar bar than a modern car. Craftsmanship present in every surface. Never an afterthought.
I bought an old vintage Defender many years ago and started modifying it so I could drive it like I did my modern cars. Trying to fix the things that did not quite work for my purposes. The brakes. The ride. The cabin noise. What I could not do on my own, I found people who could.
Helderburg started as a name for my hobby.
When I had my companies, I created a social profile under a name that was not my own. I wanted a quiet place to share the trips, the modifications, the life that did not belong to my work. I picked a name that sounded European, similar to my own last name, Potratz. That was the part of the world my father and grandfather were from. Helderburg was the alias.
People who saw what I was sharing started asking about my Defenders. They called them Helderburgs. The trucks were how I spent the time I was not working. They were the relief from the more than one hundred and fifty days a year I spent traveling for the companies.
From time to time someone would ask to buy one. I would sell it. Never for the money. Always to make room for the next project. It was never a plan. There was no business, no company, no intent to do this for anyone. It was a hobby that quietly made room for itself.
At some point I realized something simple. What I enjoyed was driving the trucks. Not spending my nights and weekends working on them.
So the logical move, or what felt logical at the time, was to go to a known custom builder and commission one. The faster path to the Defender I had in my head.
I was wrong.
The truck I commissioned was, for most people, a nice truck. It was not the Defender I had envisioned.
The builder talked a lot about horsepower. The proposal was a galvanized chassis and a GM V8 originally from the Corvette, five hundred horsepower. More speed. More power. Things I had been telling myself I wanted from my Defender. Or believed I wanted.
I forgot what my father had told me.
The truck arrived. It was loud in the cabin. It overheated in the summer heat. The cabin took on engine heat through the firewall on long drives. Christy and I could not have a quiet conversation on the highway. In the snow it was uncertain. In the woods it felt wrong. The vehicle I had wanted in the first place had been engineered out of it.
I sold it. I lost money on the sale. That part is not my habit. I do a lot of research before I buy almost anything. Even my shoes.
I lost money on that one because what I had bought was, respectfully, a kit car. A galvanized chassis. A Corvette engine. A truck that bore the silhouette of a Defender and almost nothing else of the original vehicle. It was no different than a fake Rolex. It looked like the thing. It was not the thing.
So I set out to build the Defender I had wanted in the first place.
I started by going to the people who knew the vehicle. Specifically, the people who used to supply parts for Land Rover when the vehicles were still being built in Solihull, UK. The original suppliers. The original engineers who had since retired or moved on.
I spent a long time with them. Listening. Asking. Sourcing. Designing new parts so the truck could be driven in any weather, and across the country if I wanted to.
What I was looking for was not new parts. It was the right parts to turn a farm truck into a daily driver suitable for the roads and highways of the United States. Components native to the Defender. Things designed for this vehicle, by people who knew it, not adapted from something else. I ended up having to have many parts engineered and custom made. Those became the core design of a Helderburg today.
I built and sold three companies. The thought was to retire.
In the life before Helderburg I built and sold three companies. A marketing agency. A software development firm. A multi-family real estate holding company.
The thought was to retire. The problem is I do not play golf and I do not follow sports. What I do is take trips with Christy, go for drives with my dogs with no destination in mind, or head west in one of my custom Defenders. So that became most of what I did.
Covid forced the rest to slow down. For the first time in twenty years I had a quiet morning. Then another one. I realized what I had been missing.
That was the year Christy and I drove from New York to Jackson Hole. We took the backroads. We stopped in little towns. We pulled into shops and restaurants that looked interesting. It was the first long trip where Christy did not sleep through any of it. We talked. We got out. We saw things. It was not a race to cut minutes off the GPS time. It was a journey, and we still tell the stories.
Sometime after that, I was on a spontaneous trip to South Carolina, visiting two friends, Steve and Ryan. Both of them, separately, told me I should start building Defenders. I laughed and said no, that is my hobby.
The thought kept coming back. It would let me stay creative. It would put me around people I wanted to be around. It would let me travel the way I like to travel.
So that is what I did.
I never planned to build one for anyone.
The calls had been coming for years. Friends, friends of friends, people who had seen the trucks. I had been selling one of mine here and there. That was as far as it went.
Then one of the calls was different. The man on the other end did not want one of my finished trucks. He wanted one built for him, from the start, the way I had been building my own.
That was John. He owned a surf shop. He wanted a silver 110 with a white top. So that is what I built.
Then his friend called and asked for a pastel blue 90 with a soft top.
Then more calls. Then more.
To this day many of those owners still call me Mr. Helderburg. They think Helderburg is my last name. It has a nice ring to it.
Nine years of refining one vehicle.
That was nine years ago. Since then I have continued to refine the performance, the handling, the comfort, and the reliability of the classic Defender.
I do not use off-the-shelf parts on a Helderburg. Everything is specific to this vehicle. Many of the components that separate a Helderburg from any other custom Defender on the road today are proprietary, developed in partnership with engineers who know the platform.
There are twelve core systems now. They change how the vehicle drives, how it stops, how it sounds, and how it feels to sit in for a long day. They are the reason a Helderburg behaves the way it does in town, on a highway, and off the road.
I never set out to build a brand. The press noticed anyway.
"I have never been interested in owning what everyone else wants. I have always been interested in owning what may not be available tomorrow."
This has been true since I was young. The things that have lasted in my life were the things that were already disappearing when I found them. Numbers-matching classic Defenders are one of them.
I will spend more on something built properly, in a way that cannot be repeated, than on something made for the seller's margin. It is not about money. It is about the difference between what you can replace and what you cannot.
That is how I buy. It is also how I build.
A Gentleman's Guide to an Intentional Life.
I wrote a book about the way I live. It is also the guiding principle of Helderburg, and the reason these vehicles look and behave the way they do.
The book is not for everyone. It is for the reader who has reached the point of asking what the rest of the years are for, and is willing to answer the question seriously.
If you want to know what a Helderburg is really built around, the book is a more honest answer than anything I could write on a website.
Helderburg was built to outlast me.
I am one person. The house is not. There are roughly sixteen people who design, build, finish, and care for these vehicles, between the workshop in England and the design and client side here.
There is a partner. William. He has been with the work from the beginning, and his sons are coming up behind him. I knew the moment I met him that he would be the one. He has every quality I admire.
Helderburg was built to outlast me. On the day I am no longer here, the next commission will still be on the bench and the work will continue. That was a deliberate decision, made early, because the kind of vehicle we build does not belong to one lifetime.
Before you call.
The questions a buyer is usually asking themselves before they pick up the phone. Answered the way I would answer them on the call.
William prefers to stay back of house. He has been on a few of my films and I mention him on occasion, but he is happiest in the workshop. I respect that.
The other reason is that I am not interested in showing the ingredients of the recipe. I want the owner to experience the cake. A Helderburg is not about how it was built. It is about how it drives, how it sits, and the way it makes the owner feel. That is the part I want the owner to remember.
A restoration returns a Defender to original specification. It drives like an old Defender, brakes like an old Defender, and cannot really be lived with the way a modern car can.
A restomod replaces the chassis, the body, and the engine with parts sourced from elsewhere. The numbers no longer match. The vehicle is no longer authentic.
A Helderburg keeps the original chassis, the original engine block, and the original identity. Everything else, every system the truck relies on, has been re-engineered to work in the present. It is the vehicle the original Land Rover engineers would have built today.
Yes. The current waitlist is eight to fourteen months from commission to delivery, depending on the specification, the materials, and where you fall in the queue.
If a project is very unique, I will set one of my own personal builds aside to start a client commission sooner. That is not something I advertise, but it happens. If your idea is interesting, tell me on the call.
Yes. There are two places where Helderburgs are shown to prospective owners by appointment. Haldenmere in Northwest Arkansas, where the design house sits. Painter Ridge in Washington, Connecticut. Fairtree Farm in the Cotswolds is reserved for commissioning clients.
There are also private events every year in different US cities. The events page has the calendar.
Three things, in this order. The book, A Gentleman's Guide to an Intentional Life. The walk-around films of past commissions. And the films page, which has FAQ videos and trip films.
If you have time for only one, review the twelve systems page. The truck will make more sense after.
A few more ways to know me.
Most people who commission a Helderburg have spent time with the work first. Here is where to start.
I think my father would have understood what I am building.
He was not a man who accepted "good enough." He believed a thing should be done properly even if it cost more, even if it took longer.
He was not in a hurry. Everything was considered.
He would be proud. That is enough for me.
I take a small number of calls a year.
If what you have read so far sounds like a conversation worth having, the simplest thing to do is call.
I do not do this for the money. I do it because I enjoy it. So the call is not a sales call. It is a conversation. If we both want to keep talking after, we will. If not, we will both know.