For her sixteenth birthday, the wife’s future husband gave her a Saratoga trunk. “He knew I liked antiques,” she says. More than forty years later, antiques continue to be an integral component of this couple’s life together.
When the couple was first married, the husband was a graduate student at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. They would go to the Philadelphia Antiques Show each spring, and, says the wife, “though we knew we couldn’t afford objects of such quality at that point, we enjoyed viewing the booths and being inspired.” When they got married, her grandmother gave them some money, and the first thing they did was visit the antiques shops in New Hope, Pennsylvania, where they purchased an English Pembroke table, currently in their dining room, and a tiger maple chest of drawers, which their daughter and son-in-law now own. As they expanded their collection, the couple would attend the January antiques shows in New York—the Winter Antiques Show, the Piers, and Sanford Smith’s show to benefit the Museum of American Folk Art (now the American Folk Art Museum); increasing their collection slowly, but with items of quality. It was at a Sanford Smith show in the early 1980s that they first met Patrick Bell and Edwin Hild of Olde Hope Antiques. An instant bond was formed that continues today.
