Orange Is a Happy Hunting Ground for Antiques

Nowhere in Southern California is there a better example of what is going on in the antique industry today than in downtown Orange.

The city, which will celebrate its 100th birthday April 6, was built around a central plaza that is the core of the Southland’s largest antique row.

On Glassell Street, for a block on either side of the plaza, almost every other turn-of-the-century storefront displays an antique seller’s sign. In all, the central area of town has 31 antique shops, including three indoor malls that, by themselves, provide space for 160 dealers.

They are part of a thriving antique business in the county, which has become the heart of the trade in Southern California. There are, for instance, more antique wholesalers in Orange County than in Los Angeles County, which has nearly four times the population.

Old-Fashioned Standards

The heavy concentration in downtown Orange provides an intriguing look inside the world of antique retailing--a world that combines old-fashioned standards like quality, service and reputation with modern merchandising techniques, volume selling and the pressures of a changing marketplace.

Marty Burns began things 16 years ago when she opened her shop, Marty’s Things, on South Glassell to become the downtown’s first antique dealer.

She said it took about eight years for the dealer population in the plaza area to grow to its present size. There is a waiting list of people hoping to acquire space in downtown buildings to open antique stores.

In part, the success of Orange’s antique row reflects the growing popularity of antiques and nostalgia items.

But the city’s dealers haven’t been willing to let customers discover them simply by chance. They may sell old-fashioned goods, but their marketing techniques are up to date.

Slick Brochure Offered

The Old Orange Antiques Dealers Assn. publishes a slick brochure describing the plaza area as the “antique capital of Southern California” and listing all of its dealers. The publication is distributed in almost every hotel and motel in the county.

The group also advertises in county-based newspapers and in regional and national antique trade magazines. It occasionally buys spots on radio stations in Orange and Los Angeles counties to promote special events, such as an annual antique fair going on this weekend.

On most weekends, special events or not, the downtown stores bring in a constant stream of shoppers, some serious, some browsing as they might on a first visit to Disneyland’s Main Street shops.

They come from Orange, of course, but also from Fullerton, Newport Beach, Laguna Beach, San Diego, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara and Riverside.

Several of the merchants maintain that some of their best customers are winter visitors from the Midwest and East Coast who have found that Southern California prices and selection are often better than at the shops in their hometowns.

Stores Specialize

They are drawn by stores specializing in everything from toys and magazines to rare old American and European furnishings. One of the West Coast’s premier antique glass specialists is in downtown Orange, as are several stores specializing in popular nostalgia items such as old jukeboxes and slot machines, art deco kitsch and antique advertising signs.

There are even a couple of stores on South Chapman Avenue--not included on the roll of antique dealers--that specialize in parts for antique autos and souped-up 1930s roadsters.

“There is a very good selection, and there are some good, select furniture dealers,” said Robert Dannenbaum, editor of the West Coast Peddler, a major regional antique trade journal.

About the only thing Orange’s antique row lacks, he said, is a high-class auction house and a dealer specializing in museum-quality, fine-art antiques. “If you want Chippendale, Sheraton or Queen Anne, you have got to go either to West L.A. or one of the high-end dealers in Newport Beach.”

One other thing the row doesn’t have is a store featuring reproduction furniture and accessories, which are becoming more common as many dealers struggle to balance the increasing cost and scarcity of good-quality antiques with the need to do enough business to pay the rent.

(But the Antique Guild maintains a small store featuring almost nothing but reproductions about 2 miles away on Tustin Avenue.)

On the surface, the Orange antique row looks like an ideal marketplace where just about everyone prospers because of an overriding concern for the common good. Although it would never happen in a good Victorian potboiler, the surface appearance seems to be the truth.

Denise Pontius, one of Orange’s newest dealers--and, at 25, one of its youngest--owns with her husband, Tom, a high-end shop specializing in pre-1850 American country furniture.

The couple started the store, Uncle Tom’s Antiques, on a busy thoroughfare in Buena Park 4 years ago and had built a solid reputation as one of the West Coast’s best American country dealers when the opportunity to lease a shop in Orange cropped up last summer.

Despite the successes Uncle Tom’s enjoyed in Buena Park, Pontius said, the couple were unprepared for what happened when they moved into Orange.

“Sales have doubled since we opened in August,” she said. “We’ve moved at least $150,000 in merchandise. It has been incredible. Our stock turns over at just an incredible rate here. I probably rearrange the shop three times a week just to keep the empty places filled.”

Blending of Old and New

While Uncle Tom’s sells only pre-1850 furniture and folk art, Pontius sells a line of custom fabrics and dried floral arrangements that complement the American country look--a skillful blending of the old and the new that is being adopted by many successful antique dealers these days.

Pontius, the daughter of missionaries, said she firmly believes that “the Lord is helping us.” But she also acknowledged that after years of slavishly copying European antique fashions--especially country French and country English--serious American collectors and decorators are beginning to demand quality American country antiques. Uncle Tom’s is on the leading edge of that change in emphasis.

“Plus,” she said, “good stuff will always sell. And a location in Orange really helps (because of the area’s drawing power).”

The only sign of discord on antique row is the disdain some of the traditional dealers display for the three antique malls, most of whose tenants occupy just 30 or so square feet of floor space.

Individual store owners acknowledged that malls--a creation of the 1980s--have brought even more customers into Orange’s antique row, but some said few of those shoppers spend any money in the traditional one-owner shops.

Another dealer dismissed much of the merchandise in the malls as “garage-sale stuff,” and several, maintaining that they can immediately spot shoppers whose money is destined to go into the cash register at one of the malls, characterized mall shoppers as casual browsers who “pick up everything” and “ignore the signs that say please ask for assistance.”

1-Year-Old Collectibles

But Cheryl Creveston, owner of the Antique Annex, a 36-space mall on South Glassell, said that what she hears other dealers complaining about most often “is that they don’t think we have very high standards. A sole proprietor is generally going to specialize in one thing or one period, but we don’t do that in a mall. Some of our tenants have antiques and some have collectibles--and collectibles can be a year old.”

Katie Drumm, owner of the Orange Circle Antique Mall, the city’s oldest and largest--with space for almost 100 dealers--acknowledged the animosity some traditional antique sellers have for malls but said much of it is rooted in their dislike of competition.

Her mall, she said, had gross sales in 1987 of “almost $1 million,” and averaged 65 customers a day, up 44% from 45 a day in 1986.

With so many dealers in one spot, Drumm said, malls “help keep prices competitive.”

Malls can be a godsend for small dealers or those just starting out in the antique retailing business, Drumm said. While the individual dealer’s display space is limited in a mall, compared to an individual shop, the overhead is much lower and the customer count is generally higher--even if many are just browsers.

And Creveston said that because most malls provide management and a sales staff, the small dealer “can spend most of the time out collecting, looking for things to sell.”

“Or working at a full-time job to pay the bills,” Drumm added.

Independents Lease Space

Drumm said malls also provide independently owned antique shops with additional display space at relatively low costs. She said that several of Orange’s independent dealers have leased space in her mall on occasion.

Several dealers with large shops in Los Angeles County also have spaces in her mall, Drumm said, “and my most distant tenant is a dealer from Texas.”

Not all of the traditional dealers are mall-baiters. Dunn--who has been president of the antique dealers association several times in recent years--said there was quite a bit of open anger when she first opened in 1980 from dealers who refused to consider the mall a real antique store. But she believes that by prohibiting reproductions and obviously low-quality goods in her tenants’ stalls, and by “working hard” to improve the lot of all of the city’s antique dealers, she has won support for the mall concept.

Marty Burns, for one, is a cheerful booster of the antique row concept--malls and all. She said that almost from the day she opened her doors in 1972, she “started inviting other dealers to come here . . . because the ladies like to shop where there are lots of stores.”

She said about the only negative in the downtown’s success story is that rents for antique dealers have “gotten pretty high.”

Burns is the archetype of the traditional, eclectic antique dealer.

Her small, three-room shop is crowded with small furniture pieces, glass wear, crockery, pictures, mirrors, crystal, antique jewelry, old books--just about anything that sells.

Customers Told ‘We Dicker’

She is there every day, chatting with old customers and greeting new ones with a cheery reminder that “we dicker.”

A store just across the street provides a glimpse of another type of dealer--one who has seized a market niche that provides steady sales and profits in the face of increasing competition and a growing scarcity of quality antique goods.

Customers at Muff’s Antiques wander though a store stocked with merchandise divided these days between good-quality antique American furniture and a mix of hard-to-find antique hardware and reproduction hardware and small accessories.

Co-owner Gary Hahn and his wife, Laurel, began in the business 17 years ago as used-furniture dealers, gradually increasing the number of antiques in their stock, and their knowledge of antiques, until they were ready to declare themselves antique dealers.

They moved to South Glassell 14 years ago, into an old paint store, when there were only about half a dozen antique dealers in the downtown.

For years, Muff’s--named after Laurel Hahn’s favorite grandmother--was almost exclusively an antique furniture dealer. The shop specialized in old trunks and Hoosier cabinets--those free-standing cupboards, with bins and drawers and storage jars, that were a staple in almost every Midwestern farm kitchen in the 1800s and early 1900s.

The Hahns were also pioneers in refinishing goods before putting them on the floor, a practice that increased prices but caught the fancy of customers who didn’t mind parting with a little more cash to get immediate use from their purchases and avoid the hassles of stripping and sanding and varnishing.

That led to a small sideline in antique hardware--drawer pulls, cabinet knobs, hinges--that has grown over the years and now accounts for about half of Muff’s total business, Hahn said.

The move into hardware has been lucrative, he said, because there are a lot of people restoring older homes or remodeling newer ones and seeking an old-house look. So brass and glass cabinet knobs and lock sets, glass lamp shades, porcelain and brass towel bars and soap dishes, heavy brass door hinges and carved wooden moldings now take up a goodly chunk of Muff’s floor and wall space these days.

By carving out three specialties, Muff’s has survived and thrived in an era when many antique dealers have given up or turned increasingly to reproductions to help fill the till.

Draws Business From All Over

Hahn said many customers come from the immediate area--the central square mile of Orange is one of the county’s older residential neighborhoods, with hundreds of pre-1940s homes in various stages of restoration. But the store is well-known throughout the region and, like most antique dealers with a secure niche in a specialty market, draws business from hundreds of miles around.

A block away, on North Glassell Street, Jim and Shirley McDonald preside over a store filled with furnishings, pictures, mirrors, jewelry, silver and other collectibles from the Victorian era. Nothing in the store--including the building itself, is new. The McDonalds would not deign to carry reproductions.

They are high-end traditionalists, firmly settled into an area of the business in which they have expert knowledge, lots of contacts and a broad base of customers who come to them for quality.

Unlike many dealers who buy from professional antique “pickers” and from commercial warehouses and importers, the McDonalds buy almost all their stock from private parties. And where many dealers make their living selling decent-quality hutches for $800 or $1,000, the McDonalds deal in items such as a set of carved rosewood chairs and a matching settee for $15,000.

The McDonalds got into the business because they found a real bargain at an estate sale and were bitten by the collecting bug. They haunted garage and estate sales for several years, building up a small stock of Victorian antiques with which they intended to stock a store when they retired.

“But retirement hit a bit earlier than we expected” when the company his wife worked for went out of business 19 years ago, McDonald said. “We gulped and decided to open a store then and started (in a rented building several blocks from downtown Orange) with about $500 worth of stock.”

McDonald credits his longevity in the business to “several rules we made when we started the business. We buy only what we like, and we buy the best we can afford. We don’t have the capital to be a 10 (on a merchandise quality scale), so we decided to be a very good 8. We’ve always followed those rules, and we’ve been very successful.”

The McDonalds began in the business just as antique retailers such as Don Guild, founder of the Antique Guild chain, began importing mid-priced antiques in volume and created a whole new market in the Southland’s sprawling housing developments: Instant heritage and atmosphere for everyman with affordable, middle-of-the-road antiques that were not museum-quality rarities but weren’t junk furniture, either.

“It was a period when anyone who ever wanted to be a dealer and who had a buck could go to a warehouse, buy a bunch of stock and open a store. But those people are dropping out now,” McDonald said.

“The in-between stuff is dead in the water. Tastes have changed, and people either want real quality or they’ll buy reproductions.”