Antique-Expert Twins Offer Twice the Entertainment Value

If you don’t know who the Treasure Twins are, stay tuned.

Leigh and Leslie Keno, 44, identical twin-antiques appraisers, have been revving up the restrained and refined world of 18th century ball-and-claw feet and Philadelphia highboys. With their central-casting good looks and easy banter, they are already well known to the millions of fans addicted to PBS’ “Antiques Roadshow.”

Leigh owns Leigh Keno American Antiques in New York City. Leslie is Sotheby’s senior specialist and director of business development for Americana. Together they also are part of the team of appraisers who travel around the country examining family heirlooms and attic treasures that people drag before them, and dazzling the TV audience with their immediate and blunt (but good-humored) assessments: Yes, that tea table you snagged at a yard sale for $24 is a 200-year-old treasure worth $75,000; No, your great-grandpa’s prized Civil War rifle is an obvious fake.

The brothers are clearly on a roll. They have written a book on the roots of their collecting obsession and made a raucous appearance on “The Tonight With Jay Leno” (on which they were filmed riding around to L.A. tag sales with Leno and admiring his vintage car collection). In January, they launched a sassy antiques column in House Beautiful called He Said, He Said.

The book “Hidden Treasures: Searching for Masterpieces of American Furniture” (Warner Books, $29.95), written with Joan Barzilay Freund, recounts their childhood on a farm in New York, where parents Norma and Ronald Keno collected and sold Americana, taking their kids along with them to flea markets and antiques shows.

The towhead twins grew up digging for 19th century marbles and scavenging hand-wrought barn hinges. They studied decorative arts books and kept copious journals of their finds.

A collection of salt-glazed stoneware they gathered in their teens eventually helped pay their college tuition. Both went on to work at New York auction houses and traveled extensively. (And successfully: They once found valuable antique chairs in a chicken coop in New Jersey and a 1740s bookcase in Paris that was auctioned at Sotheby’s for the owners for $8.2 million.)

In 1996, they were asked to become part of an American remake of a popular BBC show of the same name. “Antiques Roadshow,” a jewel in the PBS crown, is now in its sixth season.

The brothers were made for the limelight. They are deeply knowledgeable, funny, breezily articulate and always perfectly turned-out.

“This show has increased their notoriety,” says the show’s senior publicist, Judy Matthews. “They love the twin part--not that it diminishes their expertise and the reason that they are successful. They are a novelty act.”

We talked to them in a three-way phone interview (no easy assignment with identical-sounding twins on the line from Manhattan).

Q. Why is “Antiques Roadshow” so popular?

A. Leslie: It certainly struck a nerve in America. A lot of our viewers are baby boomers; I think we all grew up with our grandparents’ things around. It’s a perfect formula for TV. It combines the treasure hunting, the lottery-ticket aspect with the possibility of having a small fortune and education and learning. It has suspense. It’s a perfect formula for success.

A. Leigh: The show has such high ratings, even without sex or violence.

Q. What style of furniture is hot in America right now?

A. Leigh: I think the Queen Anne style has always been popular and still is. People love curves in furniture because curves remind us of ourselves. A chair has nice knees and ankles; we use those terms to describe humans.

Q. What do you think of being celebrities?

A. Leigh: We are not celebrities. We are used-furniture salesmen.

A. Leslie: It’s nice used furniture.