The warehouse bay of FOUND, an antiques emporium in North Charleston, South Carolina, is filled to the brim with neat stacks of furniture and art: a Chippendale upholstered stool atop an 1830 bowfront chest; a nineteenth-century oil landscape in an ornate gold frame crowning a tiger bamboo cabinet, situated beside an Anglo-Indian teak chair and table with intricate bone inlay. It’s the stuff of storybooks—more reminiscent of a storage room in Downton Abbey or an estate sale at Mr. Darcy’s Pemberley than an industrial depot off a busy four-lane.
Kristin Chambless navigates the labyrinth to open the slant top of a seven-foot-tall, astragal-glazed burl mahogany bureau. “I’m just obsessed with this,” she says as she removes a drawer to reveal a hidden compartment. She could say the same of all the pieces on the floor, each of which she hand selected from fairs, open-air markets, estates, private warehouses, and dusty storerooms owned by her extensive network of dealers in the United Kingdom and France.
A former social media influencer and blogger with a lifelong love of antiquing, Chambless, along with her husband, Sterling, began FOUND in 2024, first in booths at local antiques markets, then adding a tiny showroom up a narrow staircase on Charleston’s Church Street, as well as online sales. “When we launched, we said we weren’t going to ship—and then two weeks later we were shipping,” Chambless says. Last year, they relocated from their small downtown salon into the warehouse, open by appointment for those who want to explore the sprucely curated rows of treasures.
“I’m specifically drawn to the Georgian period of furniture,” Chambless says. “I love simple, clean lines where the wood itself really shines. English furniture specifically is so wood forward and craftsmanship forward; you see the grain, the veneer, which adds so much depth and character to a space.”
That character is what she looks for as she peruses European shops and markets, sifting through piles of rummage and raffle until the gems reveal themselves. Each trip culminates in a stocked container that, after shipping across the Atlantic, lands in Charleston with items for Chambless and her team to inventory, measure, price, photograph, and tag. Pieces in need of repair go to the shop’s adjacent warehouse bay, where FOUND’s full-time restorer, Dustin Carroll, triages broken chair legs and reattaches missing hardware.
Through online as well as in-person sales, she aims to make the idea of antiques shopping more accessible for octogenarian longtime collectors and young families filling their first homes alike. (“Don’t put mahogany in your child’s room,” warns Chambless, whose own antiques-filled home houses two toddlers. “It is soft wood and will get more beat-up. Use oak or pine.”) She has also begun scouting specific items for interior designers and clients.
“We had a request recently for a snooker table—basically a pool table that can convert into a dining table,” she says. “It’s something we would never pick up on our own. I thought we would never find one.” Eventually, she discovered a coveted Riley snooker table in the back of a musty warehouse in the English countryside that will be refelted and releveled. “When you’re really looking for something, you can’t always find it,” she says. “But when we can deliver on those things, it brings so much joy.”
Caroline Sanders Clements is the senior editor at Garden & Gun and oversees the magazine’s annual Made in the South Awards. Since joining G&G’s editorial team in 2017, the Athens, Georgia, native has written and edited stories about artists, architects, historians, musicians, tomato farmers, James Beard Award winners, and one mixed martial artist. She lives in North Charleston, South Carolina, with her husband, Sam, and dog, Bucket.