OPPORTUNITY FURNISHED
Pandemic spawns careers in antiques dealing at Round Top
The coronavirus pandemic has launched new careers for thousands — probably millions — of Americans, including some dealers setting up shop for the spring antiques shows in Round Top.
John Carroll was a Rhode Island resident working in the trade-show industry when COVID-19 shut business down. He turned a lifelong passion for antiques into a career, and his Pimlico Road Antiques — now Georgia based — will have a booth at the Marburger Farm Antique Show in Round Top.
Susan Fleener Apple and her husband, Keith Fleener, are starting a new act, too, prompted by retirement and changes in their lives that saw them get married a second time after being divorced for 20 years. They both always loved antiques and recently
shifted from being shoppers and collectors to being dealers with their Indianapolis-based Tarkington Antiques.
Apple describes her vintage and antique inventory as “things I like” and “things you don’t know you need until you see them” — a bear skin rug, Louis Vuitton trunk, vintage Chanel jewelry or even a Miss Texas Runner Up trophy.
“We cover everything from really high end to you-can-findsomething-for-10-bucks,” Apple said. “We’re soup to nuts. I have architectural fragments to Chanel, a little bit of everything.”
Nancy Krause, a longtime dealer at the Original Round Top Antiques Fair and its Big Red Barn, will bring her usual assortment of handmade American furniture and accessories from the same period. That includes a German painted wardrobe from 1856 that she thinks buyers will be excited about.
“I don’t like the term ‘primitive’ because it makes me think it might have spent some time in someone’s chicken house,”
Krause said of the term that some use for more rustic early-American antiques. “I call my style ‘High Country.’ That’s what you’ll see in my booth.”
The Big Red Barn is known as a center for American antiques, and European antiques can be found in its nearby Continental Tent. Between the two, the Original show — founded in the 1960s by Emma Lee Turney, who died earlier this month — has about 250 dealers.
Carroll, who specializes in antique porcelain from China, England and France, lived much of his life in Rhode Island and describes his taste and inventory as “summer house” style.
Marburger’s booths had sold out, but a last-minute cancellation opened room for Carroll, who hastily packed up his wares and headed west. He’s bringing a good deal of Chinese export porcelain décor he grew up with.
“In the 1960s in Newport, every family had Chinese export porcelain, and then it went out of fashion, but now it’s coming back,” Carroll said.
Carroll said that collectors are busy buying English porcelain such as Worster — especially the Flight & Barr era — Darby, early Coalport (a predecessor of Spode) and Staffordshire transferware, dishes that really were your grandmother’s or great-grandmother’s china.
While longtime collectors and dealers bemoan the antiques industry as “not what it used to be,” they also realize that it is constantly evolving, just like everything else.
Though American country and 19th- and 20th-century American antiques generally aren’t the most sought after, dealers agree that anything that is high quality and one of a kind will always find an audience.
Apple, Fleener and Carroll will bring some furniture, but much of their inventory would be considered home accessories and décor.
Scott Wilson fills a different niche, specializing in Art Deco décor, much of it American but some hailing from England, Germany or France.
Wilson was an antiques hobbyist, but it became a business — Sodium Bulb Antiques — after he and his family bought a home in Round Top. Initially, it was a weekend place they’d occasionally rent out, but now they’re staying there more since he and his wife are both working from home. (Wilson’s full-time job is selling websites to the multifamily-housing industry.)
As a teenager, Wilson sold vintage clothes and in the 1980s got hooked on Art Deco when he worked as a picker for California antiques dealers who supplied décor to Hollywood celebrities. He has figurines, tubular chrome and lamps, items that are catching on with millennial shoppers who are drawn to its sexy curves.
Fran Riddell is another dealer, bringing newly fashioned jewelry made with vintage pieces such as brooches. Some of her work is custom, for example, turning a newly inherited cameo brooch into the centerpiece of a two- or three-strand pearl bracelet. Sometimes she fashions multiple pieces into a necklace or uses belt buckles, tie tacks and cuff links.
Her Fran Riddell Renaissance Collection is based in Canton, Miss., and she says her clientele ranges from 80-year-old women to Ole Miss co-eds. She travels with her equipment, so she can create a bracelet on the spot but has an extensive inventory ready. Bracelets run $150 to $500.
Last year Riddell had her first Round Top booth at the Original Round Top Antiques Fair in the
Big Red Barn; this year she’ll be at Marburger Farm.
Her business began about a decade ago when her sister asked her to make a bracelet for a bride. She did, and made another for the mother of the bride and posted pictures on Facebook. That socialmedia account blew up with requests, and Riddell — a hospice chaplain’s wife — was in business.
“I’m giving new life to pieces of jewelry that are just laying in a drawer. They were meant to be worn,” Riddell said. “I want it to bring lasting pleasure.”
Anthony Whitman is a longtime antiques dealer in New Mexico who in recent years has provided props and set decorations for TV shows and movies filming there, including the recent Tom Hanks movie “News of the World.” That film had set decorations for five Texas towns circa 1870, and Whitman will be bringing some of those decorations with him, including about a dozen mounted buffalo heads.
He’ll also have old, hand-painted signs including one for the Shawnee, which he believes was a restaurant or inn in Oklahoma. His eclectic mix also includes some better-quality, midcentury-modern and Danish modern furniture.
“There are so many knockoffs that look good but are cheap,” Whitman said. “I am seeing more people who are getting wise to that. There’s a much deeper market for authentic materials. There’s a market for the good stuff.”