Every piece here was chosen to be lived with.
The Provence Collection is built through study, trusted relationships and a curated search of markets throughout France.
An Intentional Second Chapter
I have spent most of my adult life building businesses. I am a serial entrepreneur by nature, and for years I approached each new venture with both feet on the accelerator. Most recently, I was running a food blog full time, combining my love of cooking with the constant demands of growing an online business.
As I approached fifty, the question was never whether I would build something new. It was what I wanted to spend the next decade building.
The answer had already started to take shape.
In 2022, I began a French kitchen antiques business with a friend. The partnership did not work out, and I ended up keeping several hundred pieces we had collected together. Through a mutual friend, those objects eventually led me to antiques dealer Robert Smith.
Learning from Robert
In May 2025, Robert offered to teach me.
He has spent more than 45 years in the trade, buying throughout France and selling in the United States. I remember the exact moment he made the offer because I understood what it meant. He was not simply going to tell me whether something was old or worth having. He was going to teach me everything.
Robert's motto is simple: knowledge is power. He also believes that education is never over.
Weekly, there is always another book he has waiting for me. Many are decades old, long out of print and filled with the very objects I encounter at brocantes and déballages across France. As we walk through the markets, the books come alive as I see the actual pieces on display. History comes alive every weekend for me.
When I pick something up, Robert asks why it caught my eye. Then come the questions. When was it made? Where did it come from? What do I actually know about it? Which details support what I believe?
When he is the one reaching for an object, the lesson runs the other way. I ask him to explain why he chose it because he almost never picks up something he does not intend to buy. Watching him make those decisions has taught me as much as any book.
Changing the Way I Buy
My first assignment was also the most humbling.
Robert had me go back through those several hundred pieces and look at them again, this time with more knowledge and complete honesty. Many were attractive and well made, but I could not confidently identify them, date them, or explain where they came from.
That was when I began to understand the difference between liking an object and knowing enough to stand behind it. If I am going to ask someone else to trust my judgment, I need to be able to explain what a piece is, what its history tells us, and why it belongs in the collection.
It changed the way I buy.
Now a piece earns its place in The Provence Collection because it is beautiful, authentic, full of history, and able to bring soul and a sense of layering into a room. The last test is personal. I would happily live with every piece in the collection. If I would not want it in my own home, I do not bring it home.
Building for the Long Haul
At fifty, I am building this for the long haul. The ambition has not gone anywhere, but the experience is different. I am no longer racing past the thing I am making. I am in it.
I look forward to weekends at the markets with an eagerness that still surprises me. Every brocante offers something new to learn, whether it is an object to figure out, a vendor to meet or a relationship to deepen. The Provence Collection is unfolding in front of me as my knowledge grows, and I am taking in as much of it as I can.
That is what I mean by an intentional second chapter. It is choosing exactly where to put my energy, experience and curiosity for the next decade... and then allowing myself to love the building of it.
The place at the center of the collection.
Provence is where much of that searching begins. After years of returning to the brocantes of the South of France, I made this place home in 2018.
The markets here are unlike anywhere else. Centuries of daily life have passed through them, leaving behind the kind of patina only time can create.
That history is one of the reasons I am here. On Sunday mornings, I am often on the road before sunrise, heading toward a brocante, a déballage, or a vendor I have come to know. The search takes me across France, but Provence is where the collection comes home.
How every piece reaches you
The story continues with you.
Antiques have second chapters too. These pieces have been kept, cared for and chosen again by every generation that owned them. When one arrives in your home, you become the next name in that line.
That is what is really arriving at your door. Not only an object, but the joy of finding it, the responsibility of caring for it and a story that continues because it is now yours.
