My eyes begin to cross as I ingest the sea of brown furniture in the main showroom of Queenstown’s Chesapeake Antiques Center. Long-forgotten art history terms begin to rush back to me: ball-and-claw feet, cabriole legs, Sheraton—or was that a girl who lived on my hall freshman year?

It’s times like this, surrounded by antiquity, that I wish I had brought along Tony Whitwell, my college art history professor: He could tell Chippendale from Hepplewhite in a nanosecond. But who needs Tony—and the reminder of the barely passing grade he (kindly) gave me? Today I’m with Darryl Savage, a fourteenyear veteran interior designer, antique dealer, and owner of DHS Designs in Queenstown, purveyor of continental antiques and likely one of the nation’s best sources for period French limestone mantels. This is the first stop on our twoday antiques road trip—a journey aimed at teaching me how to discern treasure from trash. Plus, it’s a great excuse to hop a ride in his Hummer H1.

Chesapeake Antique Center

Chesapeake Antique Center co-owner Winfield Miller agrees with our assessment that this is a “WASP shop,” a nod to the home-ready inventory of what Miller calls “period Mid-Atlantic Anglophile furniture,” ranging in style from Queen Anne to Federal to Chippendale. The fifteen-year-old ultra-tidy emporium houses collections from fifty-five dealers from the region, as well as France, England, and Belgium.

While Darryl cases the many alcoves within the sprawling shop, where more than 7,500 flawlessly refinished, primarily continental, English, and American antiques reside, I ask him to explain what he looks for when appraising the value of antique furniture. “My approach, when I first discover a piece that grabs me,” he explains, “is to immediately start thinking of where I can use it and then mentally transpose that piece to the space I envision in my mind. My first instinct isn’t to examine its joints or screws or springs. That only comes afterward, if it passes the first test of aesthetic criteria. Then I try to marry panache with quality.”

While selecting the perfect treasure in here could take hours, nay days, for the novice shopper, it takes Darryl less than ten minutes to find his top choices.

He first leads me to a Regency-style round tilt-top table, a neoclassical beauty with four bun feet, its rosewood pedestal and top buffed to a high sheen. (Winfield, dapper in a kelly-green driving cap, reports that every piece of furniture in the dog-friendly joint gets dusted at least once a day.) While examining the circa-1850 piece, Darryl explains that a potential buyer should gather a few facts before buying an antique: its date and country of origin, if the dealer has done any repairs to the piece or if he’s discovered any former repairs, and any history the dealer might know, including where he bought the piece. He also suggests inspecting the joinery and hardware to make sure that they’re appropriate to the era when the piece was made.

Darryl suggests that the table would make a perfect center table in an entry foyer, made even more elegant topped with a big ol’ vase of flowers, or he can see it as an ideal dining table, flanked by four modern chairs fully upholstered in white. Darryl likes white. He also likes the price: $2,500, very fair. “Typically,” Darryl whispers to me, “I wouldn’t be surprised to find a table like this with another $1,000 tacked onto the price tag.”

His hands-down favorite, however, is a latenineteenth- century English desk. It’s a large, ornate piece, heavily carved all around its legs, with overscaled dentin detailing along the apron. He imagines it as a hall presentation table or placed in a library or office. Darryl likes big-g-g pieces. “Scale’s my thing,” he admits. And, as I’m beginning to see, apparently so is expensive furniture: The desk weighs in at $5,700.

“When settling on an amount,” says Darryl, “it’s the rare dealer who is not going to budge on price. The requisite discount is 10 percent.”

We bid Winfield adieu and climb into the Hummer, bound for the wiles of Tilghman Island.

Sherwood Antiques

Attached to the post office in Sherwood (population about seventy) is Dickie and Charlie Freeman’s Sherwood Antiques, a fixture in the waterman’s town for the past twenty-one years. One of the specialties of the historic building (a former general store, pharmacy, and print shop) are crystal chandeliers of all shapes, styles, and sizes, which Charlie fully restores and rewires in the shed behind the shop. As we poke around, my guide explains that when looking for a chandelier, it’s important to assess the clarity of the crystals and the metal’s sharpness of detail and coloration. You have to determine if it’s a cheap metal that’s been painted gold, or a true brass or gold-plated finish. “You can only do so much detective work,” says Darryl, “and then you need to rely on the information the dealer is giving you about the piece. After that, you have to determine if there are any inconsistencies that stand out against what he’s telling you and what you see.”

It takes dead-eye Darryl mere seconds to become wedded to a circa-1900 art nouveau circular chandelier, the interior lights encased by a webbing of hand-cut crystals (think massive hollow disco ball). Charlie, a seventy-four-year-old former advertising manager, explains that it came from an Eastern Shore estate sale. It’s very reasonably priced at $495. “It’s the shape and scale that makes this unusual,” explains Darryl. “When looking for a treasure, you should buy from the heart. If you love a piece, that puts value on it. And even though this is more of a theatrical, fun item and not so much a serious crystal chandelier, it has so much more character and soul than something that’s been mass produced at a new furniture store.”

Hanging only feet away is the piece’s cousin (they came out of the same estate), designed in an unusual oblong bird-cage shape, yet with the same style of crystal webbing ($495). It’s very eighties, somehow; I can see it hanging in the main hall in Tony Montana’s house in Scarface.

Browsing further, I get stuck on some nude charcoal sketches, artfully drawn in the classical style; a set of delicate crystal champagne flutes and wine glasses; and a decrepit mannequin of an American Indian fellow hunched over in a chair, wearing a flannel shirt and braids. Now that’s whimsy. I find Darryl ogling a nifty early-1800s pie safe, fronted with the original punched tins. At $1,695, you’d think a few pies would be thrown in for good measure, but since the shelves inside are bare, his discovery leaves me cold, and I redirect his attention to the remaining bevy of chandeliers.

His second choice is a circa-1920 beauty with art deco elements reminiscent of Lalique. It has an elongated neck of vertical strings of crystals and a basket-shaped bottom half, covered completely in half-inch crystals. This chandelier has more antique value than the first, he says, due to the combination of its traditional shape and art deco style.

It’s an obvious appointment for a lady’s dressing room, Darryl recommends—that is, if she’s got a touch of 1950s Hollywood starlet in her, which I (not so) secretly do, and so voraciously nod my head in agreement with his direction. “I’m more about style,” Darryl freely admits. “There may be a Waterford in here, but I wouldn’t go to it. That style doesn’t interest me—I’d rather have something more relaxed and fun.” Its price: $1,200.

We leave Charlie relaxing next to the gas stove, happily ensconced in his paperback thriller.

The Cairn

Half your (blue-blooded) grandmother’s attic, half Sotheby’s storage room, this is a place where a treasure hunter can get lost. Owned by Kristen Dukes, who named the twentyeight- year-old shop after her favorite breed of terrier (she’s owned six in her time), the shop is housed in only 1,200 square feet of space in downtown Easton. It’s the quantity of inventory that demands attention and time here, and it’s the place that takes Darryl the longest to cull through. (And the spot where I’m guessing that we’re most likely to find a bargain.)

While Darryl doesn’t mind a high volume of inventory in a store, what sets off his rip-off radar is seeing lots of new pieces—which there are none of in here. “Unfortunately, once someone fills a shop with crafty-type items,” he says, “it’s an immediate turn-off to me. I wouldn’t want to explore any further. I want someone whose specialty is antiques and only antiques and not home furnishings or crafts—and no lighthouses made with popsicle sticks.”

After a good ten minutes of exploring, he finds several noteworthy items that fall under the category of “sculptural objects.” First, there’s a pair of nineteenth-century Chinese vases, which Darryl chooses for the quality of their coloration: a rich, brilliant peacock blue. And they are indeed stunning, ideal pieces for either a mantel or coffee table, preferably filled with bamboo or white peonies, Darryl suggests. At $800 for the pair, his expensive tendencies do not fail to disappoint. Next, there’s a pair of nineteenth-century Chinese soapstone “chops,” with a stamp engraved on the bottom. Used to seal personal documents and the like, they stand at seven inches tall, with a hand-carved Foo dog (the sacred dogs of Asia that guarded Buddhist temples) atop each, and Chinese script engraved down the front. They fetch $385 and would make ideal accessories for a library bookshelf, says Darryl. With the chops he pairs a soapstone vase, a circa-1870 Victorian piece priced at $95. He’s also taken by a circa-1860 English crystal wine decanter, a masculine piece made worthy, Darryl explains, by the clarity of the glass, the architectural shape of the spired stopper, and lack of fussy Victorian etchings. He says it’s an ideal item to place atop a tray near the bar. I see it on a woman’s dressing table, a set of pearls wrapped around its sophisticated neck. TomAto, tomAHto.

It’s priced at $185.

“The biggest mistake that people make when antiquing,” explains Darryl, “is not scrutinizing a piece for telltale signs of age. If it’s a porcelain piece, it should have a worn patina and should not look like you pulled it off the shelf at Nordstrom. It should have some discoloration, maybe some cracking in the glazing. It needs to show something that says, ‘I’m 100 years old.’”

He also creates a “boudoir category,” consisting of a nineteenthcentury Samson porcelain hinged box, painted with flowers and garland ($85); three porcelain candlesticks in cherub motifs (not for sale, says Dukes); and a hand-colored print ($75) by Angelica Kauffman, a Swiss artist in the mid-to-late 1700s.

He also finds a fifty-two-piece set of circa-1850 English Davenport china with gilded scalloped edges and a thick ring of vibrant blue near the rim. The set—sold just before this article went to print—fetched $3,850.

My all-time favorite item in the shop—besides the taxidermy peacock perched on a four-foot-high piece of driftwood—is the hand-painted ceiling mural of twelve of Dukes’ dearly departed dogs, all sporting angelic wings and frolicking among the heavens. “You have to like dogs to come in here,” says Dukes, who typically has two or three of her fourlegged companions in the store on any given day. “And I thought it would be nice to have my guardian angel dogs watching over me.” Alas, we can’t take it with us.

Kenneth M. Milton Fine Arts

This was perhaps the most serendipitous discovery of our journey. Ken Milton’s Chestertown shop is a hot bed for antique art, a fair share from regional talents.

Darryl immediately attaches to the three plein air oil paintings by Clark Summers Marshall, an Eastern Shore boy born in the Talbot County town of Hurlock in 1860. Marshall attended the Maryland Institute College of Art and the Julian Academy in Paris. His works have hung in the Corcoran Gallery of Art and the Peabody Institute. The two works of this former Methodist minister that Darryl likes best are tranquil, poetic Eastern Shore landscapes, ideal for hanging in a summer home behind a big, white slipcovered overstuffed sofa, he muses. As each are priced in the $3,000 range, these are also bargains, according to Darryl, considering that Marshall’s paintings have fetched up to $10,000 at auction.

Milton offers us a tour of his gallery, where, out of the back room, he operates The Fine Arts Conservation Center, where he restores paintings, works on paper, and frames. He’s worked on Peales, Rembrandts, and portraits of admirals for the United States Naval Academy, one of his best clients. I’m enjoying the benefit of Milton’s expertise, a nice academic touch for a novice like me— and even for professionals, Darryl suggests: “It’s always a plus to have a conversation with the owner of the shop to draw from their area of expertise. Since the dealer is often a buyer’s only link to the truth about the history of a piece,” he notes, “it’s important to buy from someone who is reputable and knowledgeable or at least be aware of the shop having longevity. Determining if a piece is authentic is not a science; sometimes it requires a lot of guesswork. And there’s room for error even with reputable dealers. If a dealer misrepresents a piece, you need to know that they will take it back if you find that the age is different from what they told you, for example.”

While taking in the many aged canvases awaiting surgery, Darryl spies a pair of prints, copper engravings of neoclassical urns by Giovani Battista Piranesi, an eighteenth-century Italian artist and architect. They’re powerful, large-scale architectural images, adorned with foliate scrolled details and Grecian figures, ideal hangings for foyer walls. A real find! “I’d frame them with large white mats and sleek ebony frames,” says Darryl. “Or make them more modern and float them with a border of glass and steel frames. Wow!” Wow is right; they’re $900 each.

Up front, I spy a table full of botanical prints. Darryl agrees that they’re excellent catches. All in mint condition, they’re prints of English artist and horticulturalist Sir Joseph Paxton, who authored sixteen volumes of garden botanicals between 1834 and 1849 in his Magazine of Botany. They range from $40 to $80 each. Others are by various Belgian artists employed by botanist Louis Van Houtte, founder, publisher, and co-editor of a monthly catalogue of botanical prints in the mid-1800s. They range from $85 to $125 each. After digging around in the back a little more, Darryl finds some late eighteenth century fish prints ($150 to $300) of the same genre, which would make for excellent hangings in a cottage or wood-paneled family room, he suggests.

As I settle back into the Hummer, I find myself daydreaming about where Marshall’s paintings would look best in my house. As I’m deliberating between the hallway and the upstairs landing, I see Darryl leaving Ken’s gallery with the two Piranesi prints under his arm. It’s good to see a man crumble under the urge to shop.

Antiques Shops

The Cairn
23 E. Dover St., Easton, Md.
410-822-2857

Chesapeake Antique Center (located behind the Queenstown Outlets)
6527 Friel Rd., Queenstown, Md.
410-827-6640 or http://www.chesapeakeantiques.com

Kenneth M. Milton Fine Arts
343 High St., Chestertown, Md.
410-778-5252 or http://www.kenmmilton@aol.com

Sherwood Antiques
Corner of Old Sherwood Rd., just off Hwy. 33. , Sherwood, Md.
410-886-2562 or sherwoodantiques.com
Open only on Saturday & Sunday or by appointment