While Keith and I fantasize about Chappell & McCullar as the ultimate destination for English antiques, we are sufficiently grounded to know that, without our colleagues in Jackson Square, we would be the worse off. As I think about it, no one in the trade ever believed they could long exist without other dealers adjacent, as testimony witness the longstanding international phenomenon of the antiques venues. Even in this day and age, collective websites make maximum use of the maximum number of dealers with the broadest range of goods to drive prospective punters to their sites and, hopefully, generate some online sales.
While our own website activity is brisk and it functions as an excellent way to maintain a catalog, I can’t really say that we have a lot of direct sales resulting solely from site visits. With that, nearly every first time visitor to Chappell & McCullar has browsed us online. Not surprising, given our tactile stock in trade, but for only a few exceptions over the course of the last few years, buyers have seen and touched, and then bought.
Our best promotional tool is undoubtedly our showroom space, but that space is enhanced immeasurably by those of our colleagues on Jackson Square. Some galleries are better than others, both in terms of material quality and aesthetics of presentation. All, however, are at least very good in their own way. More than good, really, as we frequently refer buyers to our colleagues’ places of business, and occasionally buy from them ourselves. And, occasionally, these favors are returned.
This makes Jackson Square seem almost bucolic in its sense of community, and, frankly, it is- minus, of course, any proximity to cows grazing in a meadow. We do, all of us, have a sense of common purpose, and realize we are dependent upon each other. Consequently, we arose nearly in a body to fight a sought-for zoning variance that would have allowed a currently vacant gallery to be turned into offices. We hope to have reached a compromise with the landlord, with the street frontage now to be used as gallery space, with the back portion used for office purposes. We hope the landlord has offered this compromise in good faith, as, times being the way they are, I have only sufficient patience to fight but once anything beyond the everyday battles.
But this recent experience got me to thinking. Certainly venues worldwide are having similar problems, reference my blogs about Bond Street and several blogs about poor benighted Mount Street, both of them decade’s old fine art and antiques venues, now taken over by fashionistas. Our present plight on Jackson Square, however, could potentially be markedly worse. While the incursion of other high end, albeit mass market, retail establishments may function over time to price out single location antiques and art galleries, they are still retail and contribute to shopping traffic, and at least in the short run will always bring browsers into the neighborhood. Office use, with the possible exception of the better interior design firms, will never do this.