A visit with Antiquarian Steve Tipton is an interior design tutorial, history lesson, a series of raucous tales, and even a ghost story all rolled into one. Steve, now 74, has been buying, selling, and appraising antiques since he was 16 and says he bought his first Gainsborough chair for $150.
Step inside his shop on Lexington Road and you will be entering his world of fine furniture, china and porcelain, leather-bound books, oil paintings, portraits, and music boxes — almost all from Kentucky homes and families. The front room of the shop, named Collecting Kentucky, is owned by Steve and business partner Jean Frazier and features items from antebellum Kentucky. Step into the second room and sink into one of the upholstered armchairs and let Steve regale you with story after story of familiar Louisville and Kentucky family names: Speed, Van Winkle, Todd, and Bulleit. “I’ve known them all,” he says. “Or their parents or grandparents.”
Pointing to a green velvet sofa, he says, “That was owned by a neighbor of ours when I was growing up who had lived next door to the Roosevelts in Hyde Park. I still have a dressing table that was in my childhood bedroom that had been owned both by the founder of Jergens Lotion and Sir Thomas Lipton, the tea magnate.”
He has letters that Abraham Lincoln wrote on White House stationery and land grants signed by Daniel Boone. He admits, “I’ve lived a charmed life. I’ve been lucky to meet a lot of people for business and socially as well.”
He started at American Air Filter as an industrial engineer, but did not feel suited to that profession and ended up owning an antique shop in Bardstown called the Mad Hatter. Then he became the antiques buyer for Bittners, owned another shop on Baxter Avenue, and for the last 18 years has been in his current St. Matthews location.
We’ve been fortunate in Louisville. Horse racing and bourbon don’t go out of vogue.”
“I don’t really want to retire,” Steve says. “I know a good deal about history and interior design, and I feel comfortable here in the shop surrounded by flowers and music and books. I buy by instinct. I’m attracted to anything that’s beautiful.”
The ghost story? He lived for a time in a haunted house on Cherokee Road. “At night I could hear the clomping of boots going up the back stairs and there were other unexplained flashes of light and sounds as well.”
He says he’d like to be remembered as a Southern gentleman, but admits he is really not one. But, “I do remember how things were and how we could live again. I feel that some people today are living diminished lives.”
Be forewarned though. Don’t enter Steve’s shop looking for a ‘hutch’ to display your china because, as Steve says, “A hutch is for rabbits.”
By Lucy M. Pritchett | Photos by Erika Doll
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