What is an antique, exactly?  Or the more pertinent question should be - what is not an antique?  Since that hallowed television institution known as The Antiques Roadshow arrived in America in 1997 the term antique has become a rather vague moniker for anything “old”.

You see it all the time.  Perhaps you think you’ll hit a few Saturday yard sales and so you go online and peruse the listings on Craigslist or some other similar site.  “Lots of Stuff Including Antiques” a headline says.  As a collector your ears prick up at the word antiques, a bit like a dog who’s just heard the rustle of his favorite bag of treats.  So you put it on your list with the other ads which have boasted having antiques and go to bed dreaming that perhaps tomorrow will be the day that you finally find that long lost Rubens laying against the wall in someone’s garage.

But the reality is almost always quite different; especially here in Las Vegas.  You turn up to the first place that advertised “lots of antiques”.  Before you’ve made five steps up the driveway you gaze past the boxes of baby clothes and clusters of unattractive furniture; all old, certainly, but not antique.  You rifle through a box of books that looks promising.  No antiques here, you think.  And so you ask.  “Your advertisement said antiques...?”  The unwitting proprietor of this ploy to get you out of bed early on Saturday cheerfully points to any number of dusty plates from the 1980s with Fred Flintstone on them, or a pile of National Geographic magazines from the early 90s that they clearly kept in the hopes that “someday” they’d be valuable.  My favorite is the “antique” that still has the price tag from Home Goods on the bottom.

Generally when this scenario happens to me I go to McDonalds, order a cheeseburger, eat it in the car on the way home, and follow it up with a nap.  C’est la vie!

In the past ten years or so, however, there has been steady improvement among local antique dealers.  To begin with, the number of outlets is growing almost weekly.  Competition is driving quality and sensible pricing.  And since the population of the Las Vegas area has doubled since I arrived in the mid-90s, there has been an influx of objects - not to mention collectors - from all over the country.  All of this equates to a very healthy atmosphere for the antique hunter.

This past week I visited one of the hidden gems of the local antiques market - Not Just Antiques Mart.  Funnily enough, it was the "Not Just" that had kept me from popping in for so many years.  Not Just Antiques Mart has been open since 2005 and I had driven past it many times when trying to avoid traffic on the I-15, but the exterior never tempted me to stop.

Not Just Antiques Mart occupies a rambling building on Western Avenue behind the Holsum Lofts.  From the outside it looks like most Vegas buildings - modern, boxy, covered in stucco - boring.  When I pulled in the other day for the first time I sat considering the facade while I finished my Coke and sandwich.  I really wasn't expecting much and was still fixated on the "Not Just" part of the name and debating whether I should bother to get out of my warm car into the gray drizzle of the afternoon.  Needless to say, however, curiosity won out and I decided to go in.

Imagine for a moment that you sat down one evening, had a little dinner and a glass of wine and went to sleep, and when you awoke you found yourself having breakfast in London. Ridiculous? Hardly.  And you don’t even need the assistance of a Hogwarts professor to make it happen.  

One of the great things about living in Las Vegas is that the city is an international hub for flights to and from just about anywhere you can imagine.  And now, nearly every day of the week, you can catch a direct flight to London from Vegas.  The entire journey is about ten hours and most of that you can spend sleeping as you’re whisked over land and sea to another part of the world.

It’s been a few years now since I last made the jaunt but I am always intrigued at just how easy it is to make the trip and how few Americans, especially Vegas locals, there are on these flights. I suppose that many people think that traveling abroad is terribly expensive - which of course it can be –but with a little imagination and planning you can spend a week in London for about the same cost as spending a long weekend at Disneyland.  

London is truly an antique lover’s dream.  The city itself is peppered with buildings, parks, museums and artwork that are
almost twice as old as America.  By comparison Las Vegas’s paltry one-hundred year existence is a drop in the well compared to London’s epic past, which stretches as far back as the 1st century. With such a long history it is no surprise that London has become a mecca for antique dealers and collectors alike.