Get around supply chain backlog at Round Top antique shows

Designers and homeowners know that a piece of furniture with some history and a little patina add visual interest to a room and help contemporary styles feel warmer.

Round Top — rather, the 11mile stretch of Texas 237 South from Carmine to Warrenton — will soon be packed with antique dealers from all over the world. You’ll find bargains in the Excess Fields and finer antiques at the Original Round Top Antiques Fair and Marburger Farm Antique Show. The collection of buildings at The Compound, an ever-changing event space, gets more interesting each year.

There’s also growing interest in the Round Top Antiques and

Design Center and other small buildings at Henkel Square in Round Top proper. Plus, you’ll find vendors at The Arbors, as well as tents and barns all along the two-lane highway.

With the thousands of dealers setting up shop, you’re sure to find everything from antique flags to pre-19th century guns to European furniture, garden statuary and outdoor furniture. For anyone tired of long waits for custom furniture orders, you can buy a unique piece on the spot and take it with you or have it shipped home.

What’s hot right now are the cleaner lines of casual French country and Swedish antiques, a style often called Gustavian, after Swedish King Gustav III, who fell in love with French neoclassical style after a visit to the Palace of Versailles in the 1780s.

Margaret Schwartz will offer her modern antiquarian wares in the Peck Barn at The Compound, and she’ll have plenty of Swedish Gustavian furniture, as well as garden furniture and ornaments — one of the hottest categories of merchandise in the past couple of years.

“My Swedish pieces are from the late 18th and early 19th centuries. They’re primarily made of birch or pine, and they’re all painted with layered colors, lighter gray or pale blue,” Schwartz explained. “Every Swedish period is modeled after French periods, so there’s French Rococo and Swedish Rococo with a slightly delayed time period. They took features

David Medford An ornate gilt mirror and tall porcelain cheetahs are among the inventory in San Antonian David Medford’s ReVAMP booth.