Aubergine Culinary Antiques & Oriental Rugs

Down the block from its sister shop on De La Mare Avenue, Aubergine Culinary Antiques and Oriental Rugs gives Fairhope a second, more specialized window into the European antiques trade. Where its sibling store Crown and Colony leans toward furniture and decorative accessories broadly, Aubergine narrows its focus to culinary antiques and rugs, a combination that draws serious cooks and collectors alike into the same showroom.

The shop opened in 2002, a decade after the family’s first antique business launched in downtown Fairhope, and it has kept the same sourcing model ever since. Owners make regular trips to France, Italy, Germany, Belgium, and England, and shipments arrive on a monthly basis, which keeps the inventory in near-constant rotation. Regular customers know to check back often, since a piece spotted on one visit may well be gone by the next.

The showroom itself has the feel of a small European gallery, with iron chandeliers overhead and furniture arranged into vignettes rather than lined up like inventory. Bleached credenzas, farm tables, and period mirrors sit alongside copper cookware and antique kitchenware, the culinary pieces that give the shop its name. Dining ensembles, from full table and chair sets to individual bergeres and benches, make up a large share of the floor space.

Oriental rugs and tapestries fill out the rest of the inventory, ranging from smaller accent pieces to room-sized rugs that anchor the shop’s larger vignettes. Garden statuary, fountains, and other outdoor decorative pieces occupy a section of their own, useful for anyone furnishing a courtyard in Fairhope’s mild coastal climate.

The shop’s rug selection in particular draws a different kind of shopper than the furniture side of the business, since rug buyers often arrive with a specific room in mind and measurements already in hand. Staff are generally willing to unroll several options side by side, a practical service that online rug retailers cannot replicate no matter how good their photography is.

The business is part of a small family network of antique dealers in downtown Fairhope, alongside Crown and Colony Antiques and R.F. Architectural and Garden Antiques, both operated by relatives. That connection means a customer looking for a specific style of French furniture can often be pointed toward whichever of the three shops is most likely to have it, a level of coordination that is unusual among independent antique dealers working out of separate storefronts.

Aubergine sits at 315 De La Mare Avenue, within easy walking distance of Fairhope’s other antique shops and the boutiques along Section Street. The location makes it simple to fold into a longer downtown visit, whether the goal is a single decorative find or a full afternoon spent comparing French furniture across several storefronts. For anyone furnishing a kitchen or dining room with pieces that carry actual age and history, it remains one of the more distinctive stops in town.

Pricing at Aubergine tends to reflect the sourcing effort behind each piece, since the family travels overseas specifically to buy rather than relying on domestic auction houses or estate liquidators. That distinction is worth understanding before a visit, since shoppers used to browsing a typical antique mall may find the inventory here priced closer to gallery levels for the rarer pieces, even as smaller decorative items remain accessible to a casual buyer.

Because the shop shares staff and sourcing trips with its sister businesses, visitors who cannot find exactly what they want on a given day are often pointed toward Crown and Colony or R.F. Architectural and Garden Antiques rather than sent away empty-handed. That kind of informal coordination between three separately named but related shops is unusual, and it gives Fairhope’s antique district a depth that a single large store could not easily replicate on its own.