Christopher Cawley asked me to meet him at the 75 East Broadway mini-mall, nestled beneath the Manhattan Bridge. The ground floor is packed with stalls selling fresh produce, Chinese herbal medicine, and cheap flip-flops. But upstairs lives one of New York’s best-kept secrets: an emporium for designers, artists, and furniture dealers, from the vintage hot spot James Veloria to the fashion label Eckhaus Latta and the jeweler Reliquary.
“It’s the one place in Manhattan where you can take a risk and the rent isn’t going to burn you,” says Cawley, 33, who launched his eponymous antiques business in March of 2023.
Stepping into Cawley’s space feels like entering another world, tethered to the city only by the rumble of the subway overhead. Teal-painted walls and jute-carpeted floors frame a labyrinth of 17th- and 18th-century furniture and decorative arts from around the globe. This 100-square-foot room is where most of the dealer’s business takes place, though he occasionally takes part in design shows, such as today’s Ticking Tent in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
Cawley has always been drawn to aesthetics. “Sometimes you’re born with certain things you don’t understand,” he tells me, recalling a childhood in Philadelphia spent visiting flea markets with his grandparents. He remembers his father wearing Levi’s jeans, a symbol of the modernity his parents embraced as a reaction to their traditional upbringing.
Yet Cawley found inspiration in the Old World, admiring both of his grandfathers—one a banker and the other an architect—each of whom wore suits and had an appreciation for the arts. Leafing through old copies of World of Interiors and Architectural Digest in his grandparents’ houses, he discovered the dealers and decorators that became his role models, such as Christopher Gibbs and Robert Kime.
Cawley made his first sale in high school, after stumbling upon a collection of signed David Hockney prints. “I bought them for nothing,” he recalls, pawning them one by one whenever he needed money to travel. While unearthing rare items became a hobby, he didn’t yet consider it a viable career path. Instead, he pursued music, studying literature at Loyola College, in Baltimore, while playing guitar in various bands. “My last band played psychedelic rock,” he says. “I had long hair and a beard.”
The pandemic, however, sparked a drastic shift in Cawley’s life. “There was always something missing,” he says. “I stripped away everything that wasn’t suiting me,” uncovering his true passion for sourcing unique objects. Cawley kept his ambition a secret from everyone except a few close friends and his girlfriend, Julie Asper, who is now a partner in the company.
“I had beautiful invitations made for the opening,” he says, which he used to break the news to his family. “They were very excited, and then terrified until they came and saw the space.”
“I stripped away everything that wasn’t suiting me.”
Cawley frequently transforms his shop, altering the wall colors and lighting to reflect the flow of antiques, and shifting among styles as varied as Flemish, Moroccan, Mexican, and French. “I only buy what I love,” he says. “I’m not buying on a trend.”
Cawley sources most of his pieces from France, where Asper lives, visiting markets in towns such as Avignon and Montpellier, and storing his inventory in his parents’ barn back in Pennsylvania. He dreams of expanding his business—perhaps moving into a larger retail space or, ideally, relocating upstate with Asper and selling out of their future home.
Before leaving, I asked Cawley if he had a favorite item in the shop. He picked up a dark portrait of a woman by the 20th-century South African artist Neville Lewis. Though the piece is unsigned, Cawley recognized Lewis’s style when he saw it at a small auction house.
“When she’s lit in the right way, she sings,” he says of the painting, which can’t be sold until Cawley can trace its provenance or locate one of the artist’s descendants. The work bears an old inventory sticker from an auction house in Argentina. “I have to go to Buenos Aires and track it down,” Cawley says. His very own Goldfinch.
Jeanne Malle is an Associate Editor at AIR MAIL
