Fifteen years of collecting.
Twenty six years away.
One homecoming.
One person chooses every piece on this floor. Not a buying committee, not a wholesale catalogue, not four booths of the same reproduction signs. This is who that person is, and why the store is in this town and not another one.
The store opens with a private collection built over more than fifteen years of hunting, hoarding, and refusing to let go of things. That collection is the foundation. What comes in after it is held to the same standard.
I left Angels Camp twenty six years ago. I built a life in San Francisco around vintage, around the people who keep old things alive, around a city that taught me what taste actually costs. And the whole time, quietly, the collection grew. Estate sales, storage units, flea markets at six in the morning, pieces I bought because I could not stand the thought of them going to the wrong home.
Every collector eventually reaches the same place. You either become a museum nobody visits, or you open the doors.
I am opening the doors, and I am doing it in the town I am from. What that means for you is that one person chooses everything on this floor. If a piece is here, it earned its place, and somebody can tell you where it came from.
Before the store
The eye did not arrive with the shop. It was trained against a clock at a flea market, on a founding team at the Grammys, and on a stage in front of a room that had to be held. Three very different rooms, one skill: knowing what is worth something before anybody else has noticed.
Photographs going in here shortly.
What it adds up to
A store in a town whose first business was a store. Four blocks of stone buildings that survived two fires and ninety years of gold. We would rather you spent the whole afternoon on this street than twenty minutes in our shop, which is why we map the other shops, the frogs, and everything else worth stopping for.