Meet the Maker: Elizabeth Winslow of Winslow Antiques
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Temps de lecture 5 min
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For Elizabeth Winslow of Winslow Antiques, antiques have never been just about decoration. They are about imagination, memory, and connection—the objects that help us picture lives that came before our own. Her love of old things began long before she became an antique dealer. It started with childhood afternoons spent exploring the treasures of her grandmother’s home.
“I mean, that would be really far back in the archives,” Elizabeth says. “My grandmother had stuff that was hers when she was a little girl like this little Kewpie doll that was in a peanut shell.”
The object itself was wonderfully strange: a cardboard peanut shell, larger than a real peanut, that opened to reveal a sleeping baby inside. “I was obsessed with that,” she says. Her grandmother also had a barrel of old buttons, which became a source of endless fascination. On rainy days, Elizabeth remembers her grandmother spreading out a sheet on the floor so they could play with the buttons for hours.
“There were cool old Victorian things,” she says. “I just always loved old things. I’ve always loved ruins.” That fascination only grew once she realized old objects weren’t just things to admire—they were things you could find and bring home.
“As soon as I discovered that you could go into a store and buy old things, then I was really excited.”
“It all has a story—who it belonged to and the things that it’s seen. It existed before you, it’ll exist after you.”
Elizabeth’s background in literature feels deeply connected to the way she sees antiques. She studied literature, spent time teaching English, and has always been drawn to the way stories transport us somewhere else. To her, old objects work in much the same way.
“They’re all kind of like talismans of this imaginative world,” she says. “They’re relics of some other place that you can’t get to and that lives only in your imagination.”
Like books, antiques allow us to enter another time and place. “Antiques and old stuff, its like a link to the past, but similar to a book, so much of it is brought to life,” she says. “It all has a story—who it belonged to and the things that it’s seen. It existed before you, it’ll exist after you.”
That sense of imagination was nurtured early. Elizabeth’s family often brought her to historic house museums as a child, places where she could step inside another world. She remembers being much more impressed by those real, lived-in spaces than by the fantasy worlds created at theme parks.
“I remember going to Disney World and going into Cinderella’s castle and being like, ‘What the hell is this?’” she says. “There’s nothing inside. It’s just like this cheap-looking shell. There’s no castle in here.”
What she wanted was the real thing—the homes where people actually lived, the rooms that held traces of everyday life.
“Take us back to William Faulkner’s house,” she laughs.
After years of loving antiques personally, Elizabeth eventually found her way into the business of sourcing and selling them. But choosing what pieces to bring into the world is more complicated than simply finding something beautiful.
“I think everybody who sells antiques is so clear about this,” she says. “You kind of have to have a personal code, like a law.” Trying to articulate that code is part of the challenge.
“There are tons of things I see out in the world that I love, or that really speak to me, or that I’m attracted to for some reason, that I don’t get.”
Instead, Elizabeth approaches buying through the lens of storytelling. “How I approach buying is a little bit like world building.” That world is informed by years spent exploring England—its old houses, architecture, gardens, and the objects that fill those spaces. It’s a place she has returned to again and again, both through her studies and through her own love of historic homes and landscapes.
She is drawn to pieces that evoke that feeling: old wood, English pottery, furniture shaped by generations of use. But when she sources for Clove & Creek, she brings another layer into the story.
“I’m layering in things that speak to me of where we are. Things that tell a story of the forest and the natural world here. Things that people might have made by hand, either more recently or older.”
A primitive stool. A piece of pottery. Objects that connect a home not only to another time, but to the landscape around it.
For Elizabeth, beauty is only one part of the equation. “I really almost require things to be practical. I don’t tend to buy things that don’t have a use.” That practicality is part of what makes old objects so special.
“Old things are really high quality,” she says. “I would much rather have a Mason Cash bowl than a cheap plastic mixing bowl.”
When asked what old objects bring into our homes that new things cannot, Elizabeth’s answer is simple. “Definitely some connection to another human is the biggest thing.” Even objects made in factories often came from smaller workshops and closer relationships between makers and users, she explains.
“A human touched it and made it.” That feeling matters more to her than creating a certain aesthetic. “It’s not really so much as I’m trying to have it look a certain way as feel a certain way.” The feeling is one of connection—to the physical world and to other people.
“The person who made it, the people who used it, the people who kind of dreamed it up are a little bit closer in time and space with something that is older than just some new thing that actually nobody cares about that was made one of eight million.”
“How I approach buying is a little bit like world building.”
Some of Elizabeth’s favorite antiques are the ones that reveal a very specific moment in everyday life. “There are a lot of types of furniture that we don’t use as much today as people did in the past,” she says. She points to chairs designed for very particular purposes: a nursing chair without arms, a lambing chair used while waiting for lambs to be born, a porter’s chair where someone might sit while waiting for visitors at a manor house.
“These things go back to my obsession with world building,” she says. “If you have one of those chairs, you can really picture people doing things that they don’t even really do anymore.” That is the magic of antiques. They don’t just show us what something looked like. They help us imagine how someone lived.
Elizabeth’s own home—a former parsonage—offers a particularly good example of that kind of imagining. For years, she struggled with a room near the front entrance. It was too large to be a foyer, but too awkward to furnish like a traditional room. Then someone asked her a question that changed the way she saw it: did her parsonage have a viewing room?
Historically, many parsonages included a room where families could gather for visitations before funeral homes became common. Suddenly, the mysterious room had a possible history. It wasn't simply an awkward space that needed to be furnished. It was a room that had once had a purpose.
Elizabeth found a draper’s table—a large wooden work table—and placed it in the center of the room.
“It was like, ‘There it is,’” she says. “That’s what was meant to be in that room.”
