Antiques Weekend in Upstate New York

It poured buckets of rain last weekend in upstate New York. (And by upstate, I mean hundreds of miles north of New York City, not neighboring Westchester County.) On the plus side, it meant that my partner, Matthew, and I couldn’t dig holes for the posts we ordered for our new chicken yard. But instead of spending the day lounging indoors beside a warm fire and watching the 1968 version of “Heidi” for the umpteenth time – children’s movies are a big thing at our house, thanks to our four-year-old daughter – we decided to wake at dawn and drive west through the downpour for about an hour. If it was raining so badly at home, it had to be raining just as bad at the Brimfield. Unfortunately, Brimfield, a Connecticut institution that has been in operation since the 1970s, fills me with a kind of low-grade horror. Prices are high, big-city dealers are out in force, and I bump into all sorts of people I know in the design business, all of whom are looking for the same things I want. Brimfield’s New York State counterpart, however, is smaller and more manageable (about 1,000 dealers from the U.S. and Canada rather than 5,000). Also, there’s something cozy about Bouckville and the neighboring village of Madison, both flea-bite-size spots amid rolling hills that only come to life during the antiques shows, which take place in June and August. (That being said, Bouckville does have antiques shops and junk shops that are open year-round.)

In terms of the weather, I was right. When we pulled up at about 8 a.m., it was obvious that the showers had forced many dealers to pack up and head home. Those left braving the drizzle were anxious to sell something, anything, and we were anxious to spend. Our daughter, on the other hand, was largely interested in test-driving her lipstick-red rubber boots through the sludge-like fields of mud that in drier days are actually farm meadows.

After about two hours of looking around, poking our head into tents and waking the occasional slumbering dealer, we ended up with a trove of modest treasures that packed practically every square inch of the Jeep. I’m a table-lamp freak, so couldn’t pass up an octagonal Adirondack-style lamp made entirely of popsicle sticks (it was only $9). Two lamps with bases made of pairs of white ceramic chickens made the cut, too, for $35 (trust me, they’ll look great with red-and-white gingham shades). So did a $95 pair of two-foot-high ceramic cockatoos that I plan to make into Palm Beach-style lamps for a friend whose house I’m decorating. (I’ll be using a blue-and-white David Hicks-style graphic fabric for the shades). We also picked up three white glass lamps with handpainted roses, two large ones for $25 for the pair and $5 for a smaller version that our daughter put dibs on for her room. We also picked up a circa-1900 patented folding wood bed, twin size, for $25, which is destined for our small library at home, where it will be piled with cushions and used as a daybed. For the same price we became the proud new owners of a high-backed, vaguely Spanish upholstered chair from the 1960s, a dramatic piece that is going to be tucked into a corner of our guest room. It will be a perfect reading chair for Karoline, the teenage Norwegian girl who’s going to live with us for a year as an exchange student through the American Field Service program.

All in all, we spent about $250 and had to squeeze into the Jeep, being careful not to break anything. Even then, as we were driving out of town, I screeched to a halt and turned around. On a table at the side of Route 20 was a very cool pair of table lamps, the last two items that a dealer hadn’t yet packed up. Big, cylindrical, ceramic, and colorful – a very 1960s combination of brown and orange – they were $35 for the pair. “Actually, I’ll take $30, but no less than that,” the dealer said. “I paid $20 for them.” Since we had no more room in the back, Matthew was forced to carry them in his lap for the hour or so it took us to drive home. What I’ll do with them is anybody’s guess; every table we own already has its lamp. But not passing by something great (and cheap) is one of the cardinal rules of decorating; if you like it enough, you’ll find a place for it. Even if that place, temporarily, is the storage shed.