Northshore Home magazine highlights the best in architectural design, new construction and renovations, interiors, and landscape design.
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WINTER 2020 75 nshoremag.com/nshorehome/ famed American Woolen Company not long after World War I. All the commercial spaces on the ground floor, with their gorgeous semicircular fanlight windows, soaring 19-foot-high ceilings, and other period details, went up for sale. So did the residential apart- ments on the building's two upper floors. Bob and Burma bought three of the ground-floor spaces and combined them for a total of 2,800 square feet. There New England Gallery has remained, quietly selling choice pieces to other dealers or directly to important private collectors across the country. Objects on exhibit at two of the Peabody Essex Museum's most important recent shows—one on 18th-century Salem architect Samuel McIntire, the other on 18th-century master furniture makers Thomas and John Seymour of Boston—had been sold by New England Gallery to their lenders. The firm also counts among its institutional clients the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Winterthur, the former palatial home of Henry Francis du Pont in Delaware, which became a public museum in the 1950s. "We have always had good customers for the important things," Bob says. "Privates," he adds, using the trade's term for retail customers, "took the most important things"—important sometimes meaning a price tag in the $250,000 to $1 million range. It's well known in the trade, however, that selling the "good stuff" isn't the real challenge. It's getting it in the first place. As a North Shore auctioneer once put it, speaking for many of his breth- DAVID NELIGAN ANTIQUES Since 1992, David Neligan Antiques has been located on the North Shore of Massachusetts in the town of Essex. David Neligan Antiques provides discerning clients, collectors, designers, dealers and institutions with distinctive, high-quality antique furniture, accessories and art. 3 8 M A I N S T R E E T • E S S E X , M A 978.768.3910 • davidneliganantiques.com @davidneliganantiques