Nate Gallant: There is so much precarity in our domestic spaces at this particular moment of economic stratification. We teeter on a wildly varied spectrum of nomadism, driven by labor detached from place, from migrant work to the gig economy. It’s in the continued enshittification of the domestic American rental and the structural financial pressures preventing home ownership. And it’s in the chasms that emerge from the deepening polarization of the gentrified city. There are so many issues with the dominant experience of moving around to chase jobs in an unstable labor market, living in cheaply subdivided shit-boxes, and having little fixed relationship to a city or natural environs.
In this situation, it’s difficult to establish a relationship with the design of your lived environment. How do you make yourself not hate your poorly designed rental? How do you make it feel less temporary than it may ultimately be? More your own and less like Instagram? And how do you do all of this without inheriting a set of priceless Victorian escritoires from a distant family member? One can't turn to the Wirecutter for a pseudo-scientific budget art pick, nor T magazine unless you are already the owner of whatever unconscionably expensive objet is featured that issue. But we all deserve to enjoy the spaces we live in, to have more than a utilitarian or outright antagonistic relationship with the inherently aesthetic experience of living in what is likely someone else's built space.
One direction to go is the antique store. Not the genre of newfangled vintage store selling at Restoration Hardware prices, which has filled every empty storefront in Cobble Hill since last year. I'm talking about the beautiful pile of crap. The unnavigable flea market of garbage. I am far from the first and surely will not be the last to write a love letter to the strange adventure of discovering what you like by wandering through weird antique stores. They are places where you can still find a deal. Perhaps a unique piece of furniture at a reasonable price, or, if you're lucky, that most precious and overdetermined element of domestic aesthetics: a piece of art.
The sculpture and painting sections at an antique store are, curiously, often not themselves antique. Nor are they professionally curated. Happenstance and tragedy has landed these objects amongst a pile of ancient fireplace pokers and dusty ottomans. I value the seemingly accidental art collecting of vintage stores because the art has the same ambiguous significance and strangeness as the objects there. An ornately framed map of Annandale County or an unplaceable, nearly impressionist oil painting of the boats in Portsmouth's harbor appear before you as the synthesis of one eclectic person's taste and the sharp delimitation of quotidian historical accidents of the surrounding, say, hundred-mile radius around the proprietor's home.
The antiques store art object is a prize just for you. It’s not available on eBay or 1stdibs and it’s not going to pop up on The Strategist like yet another blobby ceramic candle holder. Maybe the proprietor is alert to provenance or history, but more often than not you're left to climb the mountain of disorganized junk and accept the singularity of each individual object's randomness on your own. The payoff is a unique experience closer to authentic collection than the instant feeling of signaling that accompanies most online art or objet retail. Far from planting yourself within someone else's established aesthetic boundaries or in relation to some trend, there is no inherent value in these objects besides the developing shape of your own, potentially new-feeling aesthetic values. Revel in the strangeness, and you might find a very discounted original hanga from the 1960s or a rough-lined mock Mondrian in pastels, both of which now sit in my apartment.
Here are three antique stores I love that are close enough to some of the big metropolitan centers on the East Coast. But going to a particular one isn’t really the point; it’s about appreciating whatever you find where you are.
The People's Store Antique Mall
Based on the amount of Teslas I saw parked on the streets of Lambertville, NJ, the town may not need any introduction to the antiquing elite of the tri-state area. But it was news to me. Nestled in one of its many quietish streets was this absolutely gargantuan, four-story antiques market of stalls, hawking everything from marble coffee tables to Houndstooth blazers to uncategorizable art, mostly hung around the winding stairs. Make sure to hit every floor, I recommend the second for the bizarre portraits and unique ceramicware. They were even having a sale last time I was there.
Kensington Antiques Row
Here you'll find a row of antiques stores and malls about a half hour north of DC. The stores are many and varied, ranging from cluttered deal-hunting to a quite pricey collection of exclusively mid-century modern furniture. Make sure to visit MOB Vintage, which has vintage clothing, watches, and a very eclectic collection of relatively affordable furniture. The Cusp of Extinction is always a fun visit, with new art every time. Also, do not miss the tiny store in the "Antiques Mall II" building, usually only open after 1 PM, with Japanese ceramics and an incredibly curated selection of Asian art, often of unexpected design or history. The first time I went, the proprietor had a haunting triptych from a German expat living in Kyoto that looked like a demonic Ozu pillow-shot.
In the Forest of Time
Located near the vacation-destination of Sunapee, NH, this was, as the name suggests, a Lynchian fever dream of a vintage furniture and art warehouse. After seeing an admittedly bizarre-looking Google Maps landing page for the store while visiting some friends in the area, I remember remarking to them that this would either be the best vintage store we've ever been to, or a portal to being trapped in the Red Room for 25 years. It was, in a way, both. We walked into the ghostly timbre of a literal Angelo Badalamenti soundtrack, echoing through a converted farm-storage site, now filled with the nearly unwalkable clutter of the most incredible antique furniture collection I have ever seen. The space crept onwards, improbably, into deeper and deeper recesses of a restored attached farmhouse. The whole building serves as the studio space for decamped New Yorker, proprietor, collector, and musician Jessi Ryan, whose stories of the good/bad old days in NYC were just as unbelievable as the collection itself. Mid-century modern pieces that belonged in the Eames House. Shaker furniture that seemed pilfered from a museum. Regency dressers that felt like paragraphs from a Jane Austen novel. The place was surreal, and deals he was willing to make were very real. It was the kind of collection from which you could furnish a whole house, and people in the area clearly do. Go while you can. I'm not entirely convinced it was real, nor that it will still be there next time I go.
Best of One Thing:
If you’re a new reader, catch up on our back catalogue! We publish short newsletters on authenticity, taste, and culture every Tuesday and Thursday, with some extras sprinkled in.
On signaling your belonging: Niche tote bag club
On a great notebook: Time-less Japanese notebooks
On our editorial approach: Notes on format
On the suburbs: Connecticut is a trend