If you’re looking to Round Top for sublime and sophisticated, this is what you’ll see.
I’ve talked before about the weary show blindness that can develop after looking at days and days and fields and fields and booths and booths and tables and tables and walls and walls of heart-stirring treasures and insignificant junk. When I get to that state, I just let myself wander around in an out-of-focus-kind-of-way while I wait for the Magic Eye 3-D poster phenomenon to take over. I hope you remember Magic Eye. It’s that optical illusion fad from about twenty years ago where if you diverge your focus on a random field of colorful dots in just the right way the image of a pouncing panther or a pirate ship will leap right out at you.
At the blurry end of the most recent Marburger Preview Day, it was Great Estate Goods that jumped out and into focus for me. It’s Amelia Tarbet’s cool, dark corner booth, and it’s filled with carefully chosen and carefully placed objects. Frankly, the space really deserves a photography shoot with a proper camera and a nice annotated catalogue. But until then, here’s my The Crush List Style look at Amelia Tarbet’s curatorial sorcery from wide shot to extreme close up.
Dogs are all over the Antique Show. Dealer dogs, shoppers’ dogs, the occasional box of puppies for sale, and of course, there’s the dog art. Want to take a short walk together, accompanied by some haiku poetry I’ve found?
My human is home! / I am so ecstatic I / Have made a puddle
How do I love thee? / The ways are numberless as / My hairs on the rug
I sound the alarm! / Mail carrier come to kill us all / Look! Look! Look! Look! Look!
I am your best friend / Now, always, and especially / When you are eating
I love my master; / Thus I perfume myself with / This long rotten mouse
If you’ve been shopping at Blue Hills during the last few shows, and I certainly hope you have, you’ve surely seen Adele’s atelier-styled booth. It’s a dynamic space for sure, with rushing B&W horse photos shown alongside soft abstracts and colorful columns.
Dd you know that the American Cutting Horse Association is just right down the road from Round Top in Brenham, TX? Cutting is one of those sports I think of as pretty obscure but turns out to be quite competitive and popular. Apparently tens of millions of dollars are won every year by folks who know how to cut for shape and stay off the back fence.
Roller pigeoning is another good example of a hidden sport. It’s the one where you compete for points based on how many times your pigeon rolls over while in flight. It makes me feel better that you’ve never heard of it either. I only know of it because our old neighbor bred bunches of rollers in an elaborate backyard aviary and traveled all over the country to participate in tumbler tournaments. (I hope you clicked on this last link because that video of those Birmingham Rollers in action with The Verve’s Bittersweet Symphony as background music is extremely soothing and would make a sweet little screen saver). Anyway, he’d let his pigeons out for morning practice sessions over a highway near our neighborhood. While they were out it wasn’t unusual for him to lose one or two to hawks, which seemed sad to me but not so much to him. All part of the sport, he’d say.
As you may know, I’m forever delighted and grateful for the semi-annual Round Top Antiques Show/Texas Antiques Week extravaganza. What a spectacle! I can’t believe so many people work so hard to put on a magnificent multi-week mega-event just for me. Oh, and you.
Wanting to know more about what goes into Show preparation, I recently asked a few dealers to take us behind the scenes. And one of my all time favorite people, Marc Elson of Loblolly General Goods, responded! So without further ado, here is Marc’s diary of his days just getting from his home base in Michigan down to his gorgeous Show booth at Blue Hills. With pictures!
…Reserve 26′ Penske Diesel. (With wind chill of -15° it can just stay running with the heat on for 8 days, or until the Texas border).
…Pack clothes for all 4 seasons and book 7 hotel nights.
…Hire three laborers for loading. That one cool industrial piece I had to have weighs 500 lbs.
…Gather bungies and rope and 300 packing blankets.
…Load furniture, lights, art, china, glass, garden, walls, flooring, wiring, tags, office, tie it all down!
…Locate every antique mall and shop along the route…..Don’t forget the windshield ice-scraper and de-icing fluid.
…Drive 1300 miles. Allow 200 miles for seeking out items to fill remaining space in Penske.
…Purchase items along the way and repack Penske. Always look for exit before pulling into any antique mall parking lot.
…Meet a ton of great people in the business.
…Dodge every ice, sleet, hail and snow storm. Plan on getting stuck in Guthrie, OK for a day..it’s an impossible place to avoid the weather in February.
As y’all know, there’s shopping and there’s buying. I’m a big, big shopper, but I get pretty scrawny when it comes to buying. I try to be especially careful not to overspend at each Antiques Show, but my well intentioned No Purchase Policy usually surrenders to a modest acquisition or two, which is still more than I have room or need for. Here’s what I bought last show, in its booth and on my wall.
No regrets, right? I spotted another great piece that I saw in Lynette’s booth in its forever home, the lounge area over at the Round Top Ballroom aka the fantastic Recycling the Past warehouse/event space.
G. Harmon served up some wonderful lobsters and crabs and other assorted still lifes. I’m also mad for his brown leather chair. He didn’t just hang around the house though; check out his streetscapes. They’re so sooty and confining and loud.
Here’s a parade of pieces Lynette brought to the 2015 Big Red Barn Winter Show.
And finally there are his clowns. What is it about clowns that feels so completely 1967? Well, in reading Smithsonian Mag’s historical recap of the clown as both a cheery and downright terrifying character in our culture it does appear that, thanks to Clarabell and Ronald McDonald and of course, Bozo, clowns did have a strong mid-century uptick. Since the 1980’s however, the killer clown appears to have taken over, resulting in reports of “a decline of attendees at clown conventions or at clowning workshop courses.” Good thing no one told the Brooklyn Juggler.
We all need to work a little whimsy into our landscapes.
I’d love it if someone would ask me to organize an International Folly Tour for them. No, not that kind of tour. I mean a tour where we’d visit a variety of famous follies, or “buildings that are often eccentric in design or construction” that look useful but are really just for decoration. Buildings like the Swallow’s Nest in Crimea or the Creaking Pagoda in Russia. Much of our tour would need to be spent in the UK, which makes complete sense in a droll, dry-humory kind of way. And apparently Ireland is jam-packed with follies, not because the Irish are such pranksters but because folly constructions were popular government make-work projects during the Potato Famine and as a result the country is a gold mine of “roads in the middle of nowhere; screen and estate walls; piers in the middle of bogs; etc.”
Round Top’s best examples of the genre can be found in the form of birdhouse-styled garden follies by Ludmil at Willow Nest. I saw my first one along the entry walk at N°3 in Round Top and fell in love with the country chic styling. Good thing I had the chance to see Willow Nest’s gorgeous booth at Marburger on Preview Day last fall because when I went back three days later it was pretty much shopped clean.
On a personal note, my house came with a sort of pitiful little structure in the yard that I’ve found looks a whole lot better if I tell myself, “It’s not a shabbily constructed gazebo, it’s a folly!” If you also have an unfortunate structure in your view, you might want to give it a try.
I’m assuming the doves were sold with their gorgeous cage but I didn’t ask so here’s hoping they didn’t become a pot pie. (Too droll? Sorry!)
The good news? You've discovered The Crush List. The not so good? I haven't been actively posting here for a few years now, which means the never terribly reliable details about my crushes are even more unreliable. Antique vendors have switched venues, shops in town have moved or passed on, donkeys may or may not be in the same front yards... In spite of the risks of massive misdirection I've left the site up in hopes that it still achieves its goal - to inspire you to visit Round Top for the Antiques Show or any time you have the time.
With that said, I leave you to explore this random list of my very favorite things about my very favorite place. I’ve tried to capture the area’s special pieces and parts. Some are big deal, some are small gestures, some are legendary and some are just tiny pip and squeak.
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