In the State of Virginia, most Antique Shops go to auctions to buy a lot of their merchandise and then mark the pieces up to two to three times. This is a easy way to find items to display in your shop. The customer is not always getting anything more than the value they pay, but what are you actually offering the customer?. Virginians, the older generation, are tied into the 18th century and the more traditional type of furniture and accessories for their homes. Fortunately the young married and upward mobile young professionals are interested in the" new antiques."
We rarely find our merchandise at auctions, preferring to hunt up and down the east coast. Venturing westward and even going overseas. Lewis studies and checks auction records for our pieces and then prices our things either at or below auction records. Usually items purchased in our shop not only hold their value but often will increase in value.
Just recently we discovered at a Wright's auction this month that a pair of our chairs were by Gio Ponti and sold for $27,000. Our price in the shop is well below the auction results. We never know when an item that is by one of the furniture designers represented in our shop will bring top prices at auction. Architect designed pieces of the early modernist period are an excellent investment. They have continued to gain in value. Not too long ago, dealers came in and purchased about 18 chairs from us. These were mostly by the Architect designer Paolo Buffa ( early modernist Italian architect). They paid around $10,000 for the pieces. They sent the chairs to Wright's auction, after reupholstering and refinishing them. They sold all of them in several lots for around $64,000. This was better profit than investing in a some what shaky stock market. Blue chip antiques often can sky rocket. Interesting note is that the most expensive price that a chair ever brought in an auction was an early modernist, by Eileen Gray, not a Chippendale original signed piece.
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