Savannah’s vintage market, second-hand shops residence to area of interest collectors

It’s a wet and cloudy Thursday morning, but that doesn’t stop Scott West from arriving 30 minutes early to an estate sale on the south side of town. He, along with at least ten others, form a growing line outside of one of the manicured homes on Amsterdam Circle, eager to start scavenging the belongings within. 

“Early bird gets the worm,” West said. 

Today’s hunt constitutes the left-behinds of a well-traveled couple — a British man and his Savannahian wife — who are downsizing for their move to Portugal. 

West has his eye on a painting of a raven wearing cowboy boots. 

“I like things that are very different. I’ve seen a lot of stuff, been to a lot of estate sales…so I’m looking for something really, really unique,” said West, who propped his plaid umbrella against the light drizzle.

The pattern of his umbrella matches his Burberry cap and mask. But the real showstopper is his bright orange dress shirt printed with cartoon ghosts, jack o’ lanterns and dachshund puppies. 

“I love Halloween stuff,” said West.

West has been an avid antiquer for decades and was once the owner of the largest collection of mid-century modern lamps in New York. He said his booth at the Chelsea Antique Mall was even featured on a local Manhattan TV station about super collectors.

It’s about 10 a.m. when the front door opens. The line is snaking down the sidewalk toward the neighbors’ house. West says it’s going to be a mad dash once they get in and it is. 

He beelines towards the raven painting, which turns out to be a print. Not worth it. 

West made his way through the kitchen, the bedrooms and the living room, the contents of which are splayed out on tables and drawers like a flea market. Floral teacups are stacked on matching porcelain dishes. Wine glasses twinkle atop white marble counters. 

A large collection of bras, designer purses and vintage cameras go for a fraction of their original price. A game room, presumably, holds a good amount of Winston Churchill memorabilia and merchandise from Boddington’s Brewery. 

West points out some tribal wall decor in the foyer, most likely from Southeast Asia, and lingers on a ceramic mug in the shape of a black witch’s cauldron, but leaves it. 

A $35 steel cocktail shaker of a figure bending over backward catches his eye. He does a quick Google search and finds the Carrol Boyes shaker retails for around $295.

“If you’re looking to resell, the rule of thumb is ideally to quadruple what you pay for,” said West.

He takes it, intending to sell it at his booth at Merchants on Bee, a maker’s market in Savannah with more than a hundred vendors and artists. West, who was solely a collector after he left the antique lighting business, returned to selling after amassing so much stuff, which he said “happens to a lot of collectors.”

He now specializes in worldly rugs, chinoiserie “smalls” and, of course, Halloween tchotchkes, but that’s more so for himself. 

West cashes out with the shaker, a handful of magnets and a Romanian vampire paperweight.

A native Georgian, West said he gets his tastes from the countries he’s lived and worked in as a tourism marketing consultant for foreign governments, a career that sounds almost as whimsical as his current pastime.  

“I’ve worked with Australia, South Africa, Belize, Saudi Arabia, the U.S. Virgin Islands…the Japanese Ministry of Tourism,” he said, to name a few. 

Now retired, he spends his time looking for remnants of those travels in antique, vintage, and consignment stores; estate sales; flea markets and yard sales, an activity he dubs “yard sailing.” Every week, West compiles a list of yard and garage sales around Savannah and posts them online for his collector and picker friends.

“There’s a whole cast of characters of yard sale folks,” said West. “There’s the tool guy, the kitchen appliance lady, the Fiestaware woman and the vinyl vampire. I’m the foo dogs, antique tribal rugs and bamboo furniture guy.”

Like West, these folks frequent the second-hand stores or, what some may call, “Savannah’s junk market” on a regular basis, looking for the next addition to their ever-growing collection. 

“I think of it as an adventure…you never know what you’ll find or who you will meet,” said West.

A collector’s paradise

For Melanie Brown, that collection is life-size fiberglass animals. Brown collects, not necessarily to revive a past memory, but to create a paradise in the present. 

“I get up and go look for items every day and not get tired of it,” she said. “Some people work out, some people like cooking, some people like to bake…for me this is my happy place, collecting items and arranging them in a way that’s appealing to the eye.”

Brown’s collection spills out of her front door and onto the lawn. Technicolored pelicans, toucans and flamingos greet guests before they enter, but nothing prepares for the jungle within. 

Almost every inch of her black-painted walls are covered with imitations of nature —butterflies, geese and bushels of foliage. Ancient Egyptian jackals stand guard at the front door and in the living room. The family’s dining chairs are actually thrones made of mahogany and velvet. 

A life-size camel statue, her newest find, almost takes the spotlight at the far end of the living room, but, turn around and you’ll be confronted with a T-Rex head with its mouth agape in mid-roar. Her home’s interior can only be described as rainforest maximalism interspersed with random items from the ’50s, but somehow it all fits together.

“I’ve always been into design as a young child,” said Brown, “I can remember in the fourth grade being in class and we were going to have a visitor and the classroom was dirty. And I said, ‘I think we need to clean up’.”

For the past 20 years, Brown said she’s been a collector of “anything that is bold and unique.” 

She said her mom may have influenced her passion for thrifting, but her style is something she acquired on her own. 

Brown, who is a native Savannahian, lived in Texas, Virginia, Kansas and Germany due to her husband’s military deployments. She’s now a stay-at-home mom who home-schools her child. Being back in Savannah allowed her to reconnect with her family, including her sister, whose collection is the only one that can rival hers. 

“If you go to her house, it’s the same as this,” she said, gesturing to a family of concrete pelicans and dinosaurs. 

Most of her larger pieces were acquired in Savannah and, mainly, from one dealer — Greg Portman at Universe Trading, where the prices are unparalleled, she said.

“I was downtown one day and I saw the stallions from the window,” said Brown, “I walked in and saw everything else that he had in there and said ‘oh my god, I think I found heaven’.”

According to Portman, Brown and her sister are his most loyal customers. They’re the first phone call after he gets a new shipment, whether that’s a pterodactyl or life-sized hippo. 

Brown said she never expected this hobby to grow into what it is now, and doesn’t ever see it coming to an end. 

“I wake up thinking about design, go to sleep thinking about design and I get up and do it. It’s just like a natural part of me,” said Brown. 

But a deeper reason resonates with anyone who finds comfort in their own home and acquiring their own space. 

“There’s so much craziness going on in the world and when you come home, you want a space where you can just unwind, let go, relax and be in peace,” she said, “I come in this house, close the door…this is heaven.”

Passion for the past

Joe Amato, who is, according to those in the industry, “the dealer’s dealer,” sells home goods, mainly large wooden chests and shelves at Seventh Heaven Antiques. He said there’s recently been an uptick in sales during the pandemic because of the supply chain shortage, which has created a dearth of furniture. But he also thinks people “sat at home and reevaluated what they had.”

“Everything we’re selling is nice quality, the prices are reasonable,” said Amato, “They’re good investments. You get to use them for a long time and then you still get something out of it (reselling).”

There’s plenty of practical reasons why people buy from him and other dealers, but nostalgia isn’t one of them. 

“Some people like stories, you know — where things came from,” said Amato.

He pulled out a photocopy of the annals from one of the drawers of a china cabinet. Attached is a color photo of the house the cabinet once lived in and the name of the man it was built for. 

Amato said he knows the origin of most of the pieces in his store, either by the way it looks or by written or verbal record. But, you don’t get that kind of information on everything, he said. Some stories have to be kept secret.  

“Because the family doesn’t want anybody to know,” said Amato.

He’s referring to the social stigma of the past.

“They used to not sell anything here because they think people would talk about them — that they needed money or that they were broke. I’ve been in houses that have been closed up for years,” said Amato, “But I hadn’t seen that for about 15, 20 years now. It used to be a big thing. That’s the South — you don’t sell your bones.”

That need for privacy is mostly long gone. Families who are downsizing, moving or whose relatives have passed call up dealers and appraisers to evaluate and market their personal belongings as vintage goods.

Those items trade homes and hands, rotating between dealers and customers.

“One man’s trash is another man’s treasure,” said Amato, “There’s probably never been a truer statement.”

There’s hardly a functional reason someone would want a stack of old property deeds or postcards addressed to the now-deceased, but there’s often a customer.

James Plumlee, owner of Picker Joe’s, an antique mall that draws heavily on the charm of all things quaint, dusty and rusty, calls it a “passion for the past” or PFTP. 

“It’s like you’re strolling down memory lane, everything has a story,” said Plumlee, “And so people come in and they look and they may see something and say, ‘Oh, my grandmother had this or that,’ so it brings back positive memories.”

So it goes, Plumlee’s encounter with the GPS lady. 

“I was somewhere in Jessup, Georgia, and I found this really cool, what I call, antique GPS, from Silver Springs,” said Plumlee. “You would put in the city, it would show the mileage and distance from that point, how long the drive would be.”

He brought it back from the yard sale to his store. 

“A lady came in and she saw it…and she was just crying,” said Plumlee.

“My grandmother used to take me to Silver Springs,” said the 60- to 70-year-old woman, according to Plumlee. 

“That was one of her fondest memories of her grandmother,” he said, “so when she saw it, she bought it.”

West, the ex-lamp collector, recalled a full circle moment he still gets goosebumps about. On one of his consignment store trips to Hilton Head, he came across the same pair of orange lamps he once sold 30 years ago in his store in Manhattan. 

“I remember because, in the glaze, a bubble burst … I’m like, ‘is the bubble there?’… I went to each lamp and felt it,” West recalled. “Whoever bought it, retired to Hilton Head, then passed away and their estate sent everything to a consignment store.”

Now those orange mid-century modern lamps with a bump on the side are back in his possession, bookending either side of his bed on his nightstands. 

Plumlee said he’s witnessed the same thing happen at his store. “I’ve had people come in and say, ‘These were mine. I sold these fifteen years ago,’ and they’d buy it back, they really do. Sometimes things come back to you.”

Nancy Guan is the general assignment reporter covering Chatham County municipalities. Reach her at nguan@gannett.com or on Twitter @nancyguann.