Inside Tucson's Gather a Vintage Market, where every month is a new treasure hunt

Gather a Vintage Market is part antique shop, part interior design showroom, and for four days each month, the three co-owners transform the unassuming brick building in the Lost Barrio into a curated marketplace of vintage furniture, home decor and antique finds.

“I do the creative side of it, in charge of that. Lorri does a lot of the back house, staff and all of the bills paying, and everything else that runs the everyday business,” Carson said. “Tim does the checkout and everything else.”

The three friends bought the business from the previous owner — a personal friend of theirs — six years ago, and each of them comes from different design backgrounds.

“I was in the fashion world for years, and traveled around the world buying fashion pieces and designing for brands, and then I would pick up home decor,” Carson said. “Lorri was always buying, and we would go antiquing and vintaging as our hobby.”

What Carson loves about vintage, he said, is the story behind every item.

“That really excites me because there is a story behind every single piece of furniture here. It's lived somewhere, it's been imported from somewhere,” he said.

While the market at 300 S. Park Ave. is only open for a few days a month, Carson said it's a full-time job to turn the space into the collection of curated, themed displays that customers eagerly anticipate.

“People expect it to be an event. They want to be wowed; they want it over the top; they want to treasure hunt,” he said.

It is that excitement for the perfect find, and the expertly crafted room designs, that keep people coming back month after month.

“They want to find things that they don't have. They don't have to go and pick for themselves or go looking for vintage in other places. It's all in one place,” Carson said.

Each month, the team collaborates to design an entirely new show, showcasing their antique pieces as vignettes of fully decorated dining rooms, libraries or living rooms. Walking through the showroom is almost like passing through different times, different homes, and even different countries and cultures. One staged vignette might depict a dining room in Mexico, with bright tableware and Equipal lounge chairs, and another an English countryside cottage with pastel floral couches, books and vases.

“This space gets cleared out, the whole thing gets cleared off the floor, apart from the big, big pieces of furniture, and then it gets all reset,” Carson said. “So, even though it might be a piece from the market before, you'll never know, because we've turned it into something totally different.”

The work to bring their interior design visions to life begins long before any customers step foot on the showroom floor.

To gather unique, trendy vintage items for the hundreds of clients that come to each of the monthly markets, it takes 16 different pickers. Each has their own focus and aesthetic preferences that they contribute.

“Andrew loves building things, and builds these beautiful chandeliers," Carson said.

One of the custom chandeliers, a full-sized wooden canoe, was displayed above a dining table for their June market.

Other pickers focus on smaller, decor items. The result of combining several different design styles is an eclectic assortment of antique items ranging from Afghan rugs to English garden-inspired floral chairs.

“The beauty of this market is we mix it all together,” Carson said. “So the sofa could be one person's piece they brought in, that chair could be another person's, so it's mixing it all together.”

Wendy Van Valkenburg is another curator who works with Gather. Her style, she said, trends toward the ornate and eye-catching.

“I love all things gold and gilded, and mostly French and Italian influence,” she said. “I visited Italy, and I loved their lifestyle there, and everybody loves thinking about the Paris lifestyle, so I think that's influenced what I love.”

Van Valkenburg has had a longtime love for vintage, and she said she started honing her interior design skills as a military wife, helping her friends style their homes.

She now owns her own vintage business, House of Gilt, and spends part of the year in Colorado, sourcing many of her items from the Denver area.

“I have my own little haunts that are great, and I now also occasionally go to estate sales,” she said.

Despite the hours and effort it takes to source pieces, Van Valkenburg said she loves styling the merchandise every month, and turning individual vintage items into something magical.

“It's constant work, we are always on the lookout, we're always sourcing new things, we all like to keep up on what is in style,” she said. “But we're driven by loving design work, and coming up with great ideas of how to showcase new uses for old items. We love it, we love our customers, they get excited, so in turn we get excited.”

The design themes change almost monthly.

“Depending on what we find, sometimes it might be boho, it might be mid-century, some months it could be French antiques, some months it could be European, it could be a library, it just all depends, and that's the beauty of the market,” Carson said.

Western and rustic Americana-style decor are some of the most sought-after items, but lately, he said, the "Ralph Lauren" aesthetic is gaining popularity, as is mid-century modern.

Whatever your tastes in decor and home furnishings, Carson said there's something for everybody in the store. It’s no wonder that hundreds of loyal customers line up for the four-day market each month, even in the heat of the Arizona summer.

“Everybody that comes here is a regular. Ninety-nine percent of them come at the same time every market, so they meet the same people. Many people have met everybody here,” he said.

Mimi Amos, one of the owners of the Arizona Inn, is a longtime client of Gather a Vintage Market and said the market is like a treasure chest.

“You can find anything from a little trinket to a sofa to an armoire,” Amos said.

She also values the community she’s found at Gather, and the relationships she has built with Carson, Boffo and Reynolds.

“They're amazing to work with, they're very talented people, and they have a very good eye for vintage antiques, and beautiful things.”

Like Amos, many of the buyers come to Gather for the community as much as the antique finds.

“There's lots of single women that come with their friends, women who bring their husbands, and the husbands sit on the sofa. It's a lot of people's happy place,” Carson said. “It's the collective of all the people together that make it Gather.”

Their next market takes place Aug. 13-16, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Thursday through Saturday and 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Sunday.