Garage Sale Slave or Gallerist?

A building on Art Walk-friendly A Street was filled with antique tables and hand-woven carpets from around the world. But Pastiche: A Gallery of Art, as it was called, had no future. Owners Rick and Joanne Soued opened it temporarily last year with the hope to close it down as soon as possible.

That's because instead of holding garage sales at their home off Highway 66, the Soueds became provisional gallerists in a downtown rental.

They took out a three-month lease on a 1920s cottage and created a pop-up gallery to get, they hoped, the most exposure and the highest price for a $650 antique caned office chair, $22 silk Thai oil paintings and other sentimental objets d'art.

Although most people trying to divest of their home furnishings still turn to makeshift yard sales, poster-pointing garage sales or well-advertised estate sales, homeowners who think they can get more money are becoming short-time retailers. Many turn to the growing number of consignment shops and antique malls to display their goods.

Until November, Bonnie McCormick and Dolly Rapp were buyers, not sellers. But when McCormick's husband, Branson, asked her politely to get a keepsake Toledo wood cook stove out of the dining room, she and her sister Dolly dreamed up the idea of selling it at a place they like to shop: the Ashland Artisan Emporium.

They rented a 6-foot-by-8-foot space for about $80 a month. They filled it with once-loved furnishings, knickknacks and family heirlooms from each of their long-lived-in homes.

Like most of the other stalls at the Ashland Artisan Emporium, the sisters' offerings are eclectic, from new slippers to vintage fruit jars. An unwrinkled 1948 Baby Care Manual, protected inside a plastic sleeve with a homemade price tag marked at $5, rests on top of the Toledo stove, which is tagged at $600.

"We live too far from anyone to have a garage sale," says McCormick. "And this place is fun to browse, especially during the cold winter months and the hot summer months."

The sisters don't have to watch their merchandise; the antique mall's staff considers that part of the service to earn its 15 percent commission. Still, the sisters show up often to restock their booth, decorate for a holiday — they have ceramic chick dishes to unload for Easter — and try to avoid seeing anything in the other 200 booths and wall spaces that they need to buy. "Not bringing anything home is my goal," says McCormick.

Owner Michelle Christian says when she opened the emporium in late 2010 in the Ashland Street Cinemas shopping center, most of the vendors were artists and crafters selling new, handmade work. But then more people wanting to downsize showed up with cars full of stuff, and now the store is half new, half previously owned.

After they closed their experimental gallery on A Street, the Soueds moved remaining pieces — lithographs, fabrics, even an inlaid door from Morocco — to the emporium. They are now long-distance sellers; they sold their house here and moved to Arizona.

"The gallery took a ton of effort to put together and maintain," says Rick Soued. "The Ashland Artisan Emporium is a godsend for people to show and sell some very nice things that would otherwise not be possible if conventional rentals and overhead needed to be paid."

On the other side of the town, Kathy Buffington of Ashland Recycle Furniture also has seen her clientele shift since she bought the store 11 years ago. Consignment sales have more than doubled to represent 95 percent of her inventory, and most of it sells in a month.

"Individuals from all income levels and as far away as 300 miles bring in usable items like an overstuffed Pottery Barn-style chair or a rustic farm dining table," says Buffington. "A lot of people are simplifying, downsizing, moving, and some just want to change it up a bit in their décor. It's always fascinating to see what's coming in the door."

Retailer Ken Silverman, who has owned Nimbus near the Plaza for about 30 years, is trying something new, too: He has hung artwork by pastel master Virgil Sova that was owned by Silverman's late mother on walls in his popular gallery.

Visitors wandering through the expansive shop during the Art Walk this Friday will pass by new contemporary blown glass, Frank Philipps ceramics and tabletop art. Then, in a 400-square-foot section that is as highly curated as the rest of the space, they will see eight pieces of art that once adorned Silverman's mother's home.

"The display is a tribute to her," says Silverman. "She personally knew Virgil Sova and she valued these pieces. At the same time, I'm in charge of her estate and I'm the only one of her four sons with a gallery, so we decided that rather than send them off to an auction in Portland or San Francisco, I could put them up here for a while and see what response we get."

The paintings, signed prints and lithographs will be sold at the price she paid for them over the decades, from $250 to several thousand dollars, and in their original frames. Collectors sometimes prefer to buy art and furnishings as they were displayed in a home, believing it adds to the story and value.