“If you don’t go everywhere, you’re not going to find everything,” says the Palm Beach and New York interior designer Celerie Kemble of the antiques-hunting trips she can’t stop taking. Every region of the South speaks of its history through the handmade furniture and small goods that were either created or collected there. “With antiques, the quality is often far more enduring,” Kemble says. “If you have the good luck of finding something you like, you’ve found soul and serendipity.” Find out for yourself by setting your route (or your browser) for any of these handpicked troves.
Heirloom Hot Spot
Olde English District, South Carolina
“All the things that made this area a winter colony for the elite sporting community in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—polo, foxhunting—means all these old-world families brought and collected beautiful objects for their homes,” says the Camden-based auctioneer Jeremy Wooten. When he goes treasure hunting around the storied estates of the Olde English District of South Carolina, he’s on the prowl for “anything a great Southern house has in it,” he says, “from four-hundred-year-old Chinese porcelain to Charleston coin silver cups to Edgefield stoneware pottery.” Wooten & Wooten Auctioneers’ next online sale is slated for November, and its showroom in charming downtown Camden opens for previews and by appointment. Next door on Broad Street sits the long-running Camden Antiques Market, offering regional standouts like hunt-boards (the smaller Southern cousins of sideboards) and monogrammed flatware. Just down the road, brake for the cache of vintage garden statuary at AAA Pickers.
Reunion Tour
Asheville, North Carolina
As Hurricane Helene pummeled Western North Carolina last September, the Swannanoa River swelled violently, eventually flowing through Asheville’s 77,000-square-foot Antique Tobacco Barn, destroying countless furniture pieces and collectibles. But the damage couldn’t shake the resolve of “the Barn,” its seventy-seven vendors, and the legion of pilgrims who travel to this hallowed antiquing ground. After a Herculean cleanup and gut renovation, the Barn reopened this past summer with nearly all of its original vendors and a few excited newcomers. Pieces of the old tin roof, miraculously stored just weeks prior to the flood during planned repairs, now frame a fresh, wider layout of booths selling such Southern gems as pie safes, rustic cedar chests, and old hand tools. “People have shed tears of relief and discovery,” says general manager Brit Cort. “To be a good antique mall, you’ve got to have at least one booth you have to really dig through, and at least one that has that curated, designer feel. I do feel like we’ve retained that mix.” Save time to explore Marquee Asheville, a light-filled maze of art and antiques in the nearby River Arts District that has been working to reopen this fall, one year after the storm.
The Napiers’ Coastal Catnip
Along Mobile Bay in Alabama
“Charles Phillips Antiques in Theodore, Alabama, is the greatest European architectural salvage resource we have in the South,” says Erin Napier, who along with her husband, Ben, cohosts HGTV’s Home Town. “I’ve especially loved buying the French bleached pine dressers for our homes over the years, but you never know what you’ll find in their ephemera stash.” Doors, shutters, architectural iron, and loads of European furniture fill eight giant warehouses across sixty acres. “A lot of people come here and make a whole weekend of it, looking through everything and staying in Fairhope or on Dauphin Island,” says Audrey Phillips Lapeyrouse, whose parents opened Charles Phillips fifty years ago. When the Phillips family themselves need a light fixture or other finishing touch on a home project, they swing by the Fairhope shop Crown & Colony Antiques.
Sporting Chances
Virginia Hunt Country
The undulating foothills and farmland of Virginia’s northern Piedmont offer idyllic playgrounds for lovers of horses, hounds, and hunting—and are awash in the beautiful accoutrements of those pursuits. Middleburg Antique Gallery, set in a stately stone building, anchors the scene with its collection of Staffordshire dog figurines, American sterling, and antique fishing lures. And just south in the Plains, Baileywyck Antiques (named after owner Lisa Vella’s late golden retriever Bailey) creates shopping displays straight out of a grand hunting lodge: framed Audubon prints clustered around a leather chesterfield; hand-carved decoys perched alongside weathered duck calls. “Sporting rarities that are heartfelt always evoke memories,” Vella says. “If I find a Tiffany sterling trophy with a significant race date on it, you can bet someone’s going to love it.”
Going for Glam
South Florida
Though she’s best known for her breezy, beautifully layered Palm Beach aesthetic, the interior designer Celerie Kemble keeps a short list of must-visit spots when she’s two hours south in Miami: Gillian Bryce Gallery for objets d’art and paintings, and Robert Massello Antiques, open by appointment (and always on 1stDibs; see below). For more Miami intel, Kemble turns to her friend and fellow interior designer Carola Pimentel, who grew up in the Dominican Republic in a family of Latin American art collectors. “Miami has a vibrant design and antique scene, with a unique blend of art deco, midcentury modern, and European influences,” Pimentel says. One of her favorite places to snag twentieth-century Italian, French, and American furniture is Michel Contessa Antiques on Biscayne Boulevard—and if she’s ever short on art deco inspo, she takes a stroll in Miami Beach, popping into the Bass Museum of Art and the Colony Hotel.
Antiquing Any Time
Art and treasures in just a few clicks
The e-commerce site 1stDibs launched in 2000 by listing wares from a Paris flea market. “We started by bringing that sense of unexpected discovery that you’d get strolling the market to the digital realm,” says Anthony Barzilay Freund, the company’s editorial director and director of fine art. Twenty-five years later, 1stDibs has blown open the doors to the design world for at-home collectors, connecting them with some seven thousand antique and art dealers and shipping to every corner of the planet. (As it happens, two of the top markets for both retailers and buyers are Atlanta and New Orleans.) Beware the rabbit holes: You might start by scrolling through nineteenth-century iron and marble bistro tables and end up with an original Hunt Slonem painting delivered straight to your doorstep.
