In the Trade: Susan Silver of Sheffield, Massachusetts

by Frank Donegan

So you think it's tough being an Americana dealer these days? Try selling English stuff. Susan Silver deals almost exclusively in English furniture from her well-appointed shop on Route 7 in Sheffield, Massachusetts. Like most dealers, she finds that selling anything is a lot harder than it used to be. Yet she has an added problem-it's also harder than ever to replace what she does manage to sell, because the English antiques business is quite simply dying.

"They're in even worse shape than we are," Silver said. "All my sources are in England, and half of the shops in England are all gone. Every little town used to have an antiques shop, and now they're gone." Even the famous London venues are in trouble, she said. "Portobello Road is disappearing, King's Road too, and Camden Passage is going."

By comparison, her neighborhood—the stretch of Route 7 from Great Barrington south to the Connecticut border—might almost appear prosperous. Dealers may not be selling much, but at least they're keeping their shops open, she said. "Everybody's holding on."

It is a struggle, though. "It's been such a strange year," Silver said. She has severely cut back her buying trips abroad. "I was going three or four times a year for two or three weeks at a time. Last year I went only once."

A look around her shop makes one thing clear. Even if the English antiques trade were to disappear tomorrow, Susan Silver would be able to sell English antiques for well into the foreseeable future. The sparse gallery look is not for her. Her 2500-square-foot display space is crammed with furniture and with all the accessories-looking glasses, ceramics, glassware, lamps, trays, grand tour souvenirs, desk boxes, sewing boxes, tea caddies-that go along with a formal English look. On the day we visited, for instance, there were a dozen library tables, most of them impressive Regency and William IV pieces, in the shop. "I like library furniture," Silver said by way of understatement.

At her shop, "there's very little foot traffic," she said. "This is a big second-home area—lots of people with money. I don't know where those people went. I love talking to people, and I miss that." In fact, most of the "talking" she does these days is by e-mail. "If not for my Web site and 1stdibs, I'd be selling a lot less than I am," she said.

Silver is particularly enthusiastic about 1stdibs. "I get people from all over the world—Ireland, India. I just got two e-mails from France." She said she has always advertised heavily but now invests much of her advertising budget in the Web. She maintains her Web site herself. She realized the Internet was the future about five years ago, when she sold a Staffordshire lion on her site for $10,000. "It was the first thing I ever sold on my Web site," she said. "I was in total shock. I couldn't believe somebody would pay that much without seeing it."

Silver considers herself a middle-market dealer rather than a high-end one, explaining that she doesn't have $100,000 items in the shop. Nevertheless, she deals in a lot of material with five-figure prices.

Although Silver may buy the occasional French or Italian or Swedish piece, most of her furniture is English. "I love furniture, and I particularly like English furniture," she said. "It's so much more interesting, and the forms are more varied. I look at some of their pieces of metamorphic furniture, for instance, and think, 'How did they think of that?'"

She is particularly fond of how English cabinetmakers used wood. "They're so skilled. They had apprenticeships of eleven, twelve, or thirteen years. The English colonized the world and had the first pick of woods—rosewood, kingwood, satinwood, ebony."

She's so enamored of English workmanship that she even brings things over on her buying trips to get repairs done. She said it can be cheaper and quicker. She recalled, for example, that she had a pair of decanters and dropped one of the stoppers, which smashed. ("I'm terrible; I'm not careful," she said.) She took the stopper from the matching decanter and visited glass restorers in New York. "One guy said it will be six-hundred dollars and six weeks. The other said he couldn't do it," she said.

So Silver took the good stopper to England and asked for a match. "After two weeks I go back for it, and he said he didn't do a good job and is going to do it over," she remembered. "I, being a suspicious American, just figured he hadn't done it yet and was putting me off. But I was leaving to come home and insisted on seeing if he had actually done it. He had. It was perfect. He said, 'No, no. It has a bubble.' The bubble was so tiny you couldn't see it. It cost twenty pounds, which was about twenty-five dollars at the time."

She said she found the same care lavished on metalwork by restorers who have not only made new pieces indistinguishable from old but have also given her the molds, in case she needs to make more. (Luckily, she said, she has found a great local furniture restorer, so she doesn't have to cart chairs and tables back to England.)

Silver also has adopted the English view of restoration, which, as she points out, is "one-hundred-eighty degrees from the American." In other words, pieces should look pretty much as they did when the cabinetmaker created them. Dark, dirty "early surfaces" don't interest her.

Silver also noted that the old knock on English furniture-that it will warp and crack when it goes from dank English houses to overheated American ones-is no longer true. "You just don't see that much anymore," she said. "For the last fifteen years or so they've all had central heating there." She does warn about recently arrived Irish furniture. "I adore Irish furniture, but the Irish are terrible at storing their furniture. They're always putting it in a barn with a leak in the roof."

Silver did not have any particular bias toward English furniture when she started out, although she did earn a degree in English literature from the University of Connecticut. She grew up in the comfortable suburbs of lower Fairfield County, Connecticut. She said she inherited her taste from her mother, who was a designer at Bloomingdale's. "She was amazing," she said. "She had a fantastic eye. I think I picked up her talents in that respect."

Silver said she was never a collector and didn't become a dealer until later in life. "This is my third life," she said.

Her first job out of college was working for Radio Free Europe in New York, where she edited English-language journals focusing on eastern Europe. She said, "I was a kid working with these eastern European guys who were ex-premiers of their countries—Latvia, Estonia, Hungary. They were all brilliant."

Silver learned an important lesson in this position, namely, not to be too free with one's opinions. She explained that her superiors asked her what she thought of the journals. She told them that each issue seemed to be a rehash of earlier issues. Her bosses thought about this and agreed. They shut down the journals, and she was out of a job.

She stayed in publishing for a while, then moved into advertising as a stylist designing backgrounds for print ads and commercials. She also became a photographers' representative. "I hated that job," Silver said. "It was the most unsatisfying stuff I ever did in my life."

By this time—the early 1980's—she had a country house in Sheffield and had started buying antiques on weekends. She put formal, mostly American things in the Millbrook Antiques Mall and immediately started selling. She recalled, "That was the era of country pine. The woman who ran the place said, 'I just want to warn you that these things don't sell.' But actually formal things were just coming in, and my pieces flew out the door."

Dissatisfied with her New York job, Silver decided to convert a barn on her property into a shop. "I was forty-five, and you can't be old in the advertising business," she said.

Once she renovated the barn, she realized it was a lot bigger than a booth in an antiques center. She panicked and called her brother, a lawyer with a taste for antiques. He told her to go over to England and fill up a container.

Silver said, "I didn't know anything about this sort of thing, but my brother called a dealer at Harrods that he knew and said, 'My sister's going over, and I want you to show her around.' The dealer was an incredible man, Ken Sweet, who took me under his wing. He was Cornish and hated Margaret Thatcher."

So she became a dealer in English antiques. Her shop was three miles west of the Route 7 antiques corridor, but she did business. "I might only have one or two people a day, but they bought," she said. That is, until the covered bridge on the road to her shop collapsed. Suddenly, "instead of being three miles down the road, I was a sixteen-mile detour."

She bought a building on Route 7, renovated it, and has been there ever since. It's a good thing she moved, she said, because the bridge was out for three years. Silver doesn't plan to make any major changes in the near future. She doesn't do shows. ("I did three shows when I first started in the business, and I never made any money.")

You certainly won't see her selling mid-century modern. Those pieces, she said, "make antiques look cheap. You could buy two fabulous antiques for the price of one Fifties designer piece."

Silver sees hints that things may be looking up. "Brown furniture seems to be coming back in England," she said, adding that the "antiques-are-green" notion appears to be gaining traction there. In the meantime, she said, "I'm still doing the same old thing. I keep my nose down and just sell my furniture. It's such a great business. You never see the same thing twice."

For further information, contact Susan Silver Antiques, 755 North Main Street (Route 7), Sheffield, MA 01257; (413) 229-8169; Web site (www.susansilverantiques.com). Open 10:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., closed Tuesdays and Wednesdays in winter; closed Tuesdays for the remainder of the year.

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