Ye Olde Antique Business Taking On a New Look
Stewart Roth loves antique furniture.
Roth and his wife live in an antique-filled home, built in 1901 in the historic French Park section of Santa Ana.
And, until about five years ago, the Roths made their living--a very good one--selling antiques from a large warehouse store in Orange County.
But nowadays, Roth mainly sells high-quality antique reproductions.
So does the Antique Guild. The chain, founded in 1972 in Culver City, was one of the first large-scale importers and retailers of European antiques on the West Coast.
It still sells a lot of antiques, but reproductions and new accessories now account for 70% of its more than $20 million in annual sales.
Visionaries such as Roth and Antique Guild founder Don Guild were part of a revolution in the antique business in the early 1970s, using volume buying and mass marketing to bring antique furniture to everyman.
Now, they are part of a second revolution that is changing the face of the industry they helped start.
It is a change, driven by the laws of supply and demand, that is moving the price of middle of the road antiques into the stratosphere, making reproductions as acceptable as the real thing in some quarters and driving some dealers out of business. At the same time, it is opening up the teeming Southern California market to a growing number of retailers willing and able to adopt modern selling methods and adapt to new conditions.
For much of the past two decades “antiques” to most people has meant antique furniture, mainly oak.
Age, while important, has not been a critical factor in determining just what is an antique. The U.S. Customs Service says that any piece more than 100 years old is an antique and thus exempt from import duties. But most dealers and collectors agree that an antique can be just about anything that is desirable and unique--or at least no longer manufactured or readily available. Chrome and Formica dinettes from the 1950s aren’t antiques yet--although they are enjoying a boom both here and in Europe--but old televisions from 1950 are considered antiques in most areas.
The furniture that forms the backbone of the mainstream antique business is called shipping goods--functional, well-built pieces that graced middle-class parlors and bedrooms in Europe and the American East and Midwest in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
“But mainly, it is just really used furniture,” said John Atkinson, chief buyer for Lyman Drake Antiques, one of Southern California’s largest wholesale importers of French and English antiques.
Fine art antiques, the one of a kind, museum-quality furnishings and collectables that grace the pages of upscale magazines like Architectural Digest and the selling floors of top-drawer auction houses like Christie’s and Sotheby Parke Bernet, have not been much affected by changes in the industry--except that their prices have undergone quantum leaps.
But the middle of the road market has altered considerably.
- As decent-quality “everyday” antique furniture has become harder to find, particularly at middle-market prices, the number of dealers specializing in furniture has diminished while those offering small goods--glassware, jewelry, ceramics, folk art--and nostalgia items have increased dramatically. In Southern California, one of the nation’s major antique markets, there are an estimated 1,000 dealers in antiques and collectibles. Some industry insiders estimate the volume of business in the Los Angeles-Orange-San Diego-Inland Empire region at $200 million a year or more.
- This huge concentration has given rise to the creation of antique malls--cooperatives or for-profit operations that lease small spaces to dozens or even hundreds of dealers under one roof. It also has prompted antique dealers to discover the crowd-increasing benefits of grouping together into clusters of shops. In Orange, Pomona and Yucaipa--the Southland’s only true antique rows--major conglomerations of dealers have developed over the years.
- As shoppers’ demand for instant heritage has grown, reproduction pieces have increased in quality and dropped in price, leading some antique dealers to mix the real and the reproductions on their showroom floors. Their aim is is to satisfy both the purist and the consumer looking to combine the flavor of a time gone by with the practicality of modern conveniences like metal drawer slides and no-mar finishes.
- At the same time, the Southland’s growing population, its large pockets of high-income households and a growing sophistication among its antique aficionados has increased business for those traditional dealers who have weathered the changes of the past two decades, industry specialists say.
It is difficult to get an exact fix on the size and scope of the antique business in Southern California because most dealers are small and very, very private.
Larger Markets
But industry watchers say that the Southland is one of the largest marketplaces in the nation, with an estimated gross dollar volume of antique sales of about $200 million a year.
“The business is good and getting better nowadays, because of the growth and maturity of the people in the business and the improving taste of the people who live here. It takes a while for traditions to develop, but they are developing and Southern California has become a powerhouse area,” said Robert Dannenbaum, editor of the Whittier-based West Coast Peddler, a monthly antiques trade journal founded 18 years ago.
“The New York, Boston and Chicago markets are a bit bigger than Southern California’s, but there is nothing else that is close,” he said.
And he qualifies the comparisons with Chicago and the East Coast megalopolis by pointing out that much of the market there is devoted to high-priced, fine art antiques while much of Southern California’s market serves a clientele more interested in furnishing homes and offices than in acquiring investment-quality antiques.
The Southland, agrees Kyle Husfloen, editor of the 75,000-circulation Antique Trader, “has the strongest (antique-buying) population and the highest concentration of dealers in the county.”
Husfloen’s Dubuque, Iowa, weekly is the largest advertising vehicle in the antique industry, showcasing several million dollars worth of goods in each issue. Southern California, he said, is one of the largest sources both of advertising and subscriptions for the paper.
The region’s dealers range from garage sale enthusiasts who make pocket money peddling their finds from tiny mall spaces, through those who offer functional old furniture and accessories at mass-market prices, and into the world of high-end specialists whose antiques are every bit as rare and beautiful as the canvases of the old masters--and every bit as expensive.
But changes in the once-hidebound industry, especially the trend toward concentrating shops in malls and antique rows, have been slow coming.
More Shoppers
Jim McDonald, who served as president of the Old Orange Antiques Dealers Assn. for 10 years, said the virtues of concentrating and cooperative advertising were argued for almost his entire decade in office. The central Orange County city now boasts the largest collection of antique shops in Southern California, with 31 stores and more than 180 dealers clustered in a two-block area around the 100-year-old city’s central plaza.
Just as shoe shops and clothiers have discovered that locating in a retail mall surrounded by competitors can actually increase business, antique dealers are finding that grouping their stores together boosts the number of shoppers considerably.
Denise Pontius, co-owner of a store specializing in expensive pre-1850 American country furniture and folk art, said that her business has more than doubled to about $150,000 in sales in the six months since she and her husband moved their shop to Orange’s antique row from a busy main highway location in Buena Park, where it stood alone.
The heavy concentration of stores brings droves of customers from all over the Southland to Orange each week, and the proprietors of most of the specialty stores there say they also have a large number of out-of-state customers who regularly visit the antique row while in the area on business trips or annual vacations.
Merchants at the only other true antique rows in Southern California--in the design district of West Los Angeles and in Pomona and Yucaipa--report the same heavy volume of traffic, said Dannenbaum, who defines a row as 15 or more stores within a few blocks.
Several other areas, including Santa Monica, Venice, San Diego, Newport Beach and Laguna Beach, have large clusters of a dozen or so shops each, and, as a quick check of any telephone directory will affirm, almost every city in Southern California has at least one antique store that it can call its own.
But in the decades before people like Guild and Roth brought modern merchandising into the trade, only the well-heeled prowled the Southland’s often-snooty antique shops, often spending thousands of dollars for museum-quality pieces to adorn their homes.
Warehouse Stores
Guild and a few others who saw potential in the antique business, however, introduced volume-buying and mass-marketing techniques in the early 1970s and changed the industry.
They centered their buying on middle of the road furniture and accessories, functional everyday pieces that would never qualify as fine, highly crafted antiques. And they brought it over by the boatload, selling from large, warehouse-type retail stores.
By doing that, they made old English hutches and Italian settees and French armoires affordable to millions of Southern Californians who were longing to introduce something different, something with tradition, into the cookie-cutter tract homes that filled the sprawling basin.
“When the public found its way into antique stores in the 1970s, it changed the character of antique business totally,” said Randall Green, chairman of AA Importing Corp., the 50-year-old St. Louis antique and antique reproduction wholesaler that acquired the Antique Guild in 1985.
AA Importing began life in the 1930s, bringing in fine European antiques for wholesale to dealers throughout the Midwest. After World War II, when growth patterns in the United States shifted west, where there was little in the way of an indigenous antique supply, AA began importing reproductions as well, Green said.
“Business stayed like that through the early 1970s because the antique market remained a very narrow collectors’ type of market, where customers went out of their way to find small shops in less than classy neighborhoods,” he said.
When retailer Don Guild, founder of the Los Angeles-based Guild Drug Store chain, started the Antique Guild in 1972, “his perception was that the mass public was discovering antiques,” Green said.
Guild “innovated the supermarket approach,” renting 84,000 square feet in the old Helms Bakery building in Culver City and cramming it with middle-class furnishings from the England of the late 1800s and early 1900s.
But, as the years went on, he started adding reproductions, both because there was less older merchandise available and because the nature of the customer was changing.
By the time Antique Guild was acquired by AA Importing in 1985, close to half its stock was reproduction furniture and accessories. This year, Green said, true antiques will account for only about 30% of sales at the chain’s 12 stores in Southern California and Phoenix.
Added Reproductions
The large Antique Guilds--located in Culver City, Santa Ana and Woodland Hills, with one more scheduled to open in Atlanta later this year--sell not only furniture, but period wallpaper, floor coverings, upholstery fabrics and accessories and complete interior decorating services. The merchandise, once displayed in ranks of tables, chairs, bedsteads and cupboards, now is displayed by period and style, under labels like “Country French.”
Still, Green said, “we haven’t shifted away from antiques, we’ve just added reproductions because of an explosion of interest in traditionally styled goods. There is a broad, less discriminating segment of the general public that wants the feel of antiques, but doesn’t care as much if the pieces are old or new.”
One byproduct of that explosion, he said, is that it “has generally elevated the prices of rather pedestrian collectibles to a higher status, where they now equal the price of a new piece of finely crafted furniture.”
And that has driven some dealers out of the antique business.
In the mid- and late 1970s, said Orange County dealer Roth, “I could buy an oak dresser in New England for $250 and sell it here for $400. It was a good piece of furniture and a comparable new piece here went for $600, so the customer not only got quality, he got a good price. The antique was a real value.
“But it has gotten to where 90% of the the good stuff has been picked over. I’d have to pay $500 for that dresser and sell it for $700 and my customer could by a new piece for the same price or less.”
Roth, who still buys a few antiques to resell--generally larger, more expensive architectural pieces like carved fireplace mantels and china cabinets--is fairly pessimistic about the future of the middle of the road antique retailing industry he helped create, but is upbeat about the prospects for dealers specializing in high quality pieces.
“Upper-end antiques are still taking off, still appreciating, and they always will,” he said. “They follow the same line as fine art. But they are out of the reach of the bread-and-butter buyer. If the accessibility of antiques was still high, I’d still be out there playing the antique game. But you can’t find enough to sell in volume to make a profit.”
Forests Gone
Atkinson, the Lyman Drake buyer, said the rise in prices is a direct result of a decline in the availability of good, functional pieces.
While the craftsmen and factories of 19th- and early 20th-Century Europe and American turned out a sufficient supply of goods for the demand of the time, there were far fewer consumers then than now, he said.
Additionally, Atkinson said, the horrendous artillery barrages of World War I wiped out most of the ancient hardwood forests of Europe, dramatically limiting the supply of fine woods whose tight grain and natural beauty make pre-1920s wooden furniture so different from items produced today.
“That alone makes most antiques irreplaceable,” he said. “You can’t even make realistic copies.”
The huge growth in antique retailing in the past 15 years has eaten up much of the supply of decent-quality old furniture, he said.
For Lyman Drake, that means some fundamental changes. The company, which sells millions of dollars worth of goods each year, Atkinson said, now imports an average of one 40-foot shipping container a week. “We still bring in some superb stuff, pieces you can’t duplicate, but the majority of our stock is just old furniture that is practical to use. And in the used furniture market, it is tough to compete with reproductions,” he said.
“In the end, we will bring over fewer and fewer containers, but of better and better quality.”
To augment sales volume and help recover the additional costs of securing high-quality antiques, he said, the Santa Ana-based wholesaler also will begin distributing reproductions for the first time in its 15-year history.
