King’s Row Antiques

King’s Row Antiques has been a fixture of downtown Guntersville, Alabama since it opened on April 1, 2011, taking over the building that once housed King’s clothing store at 368 Gunter Ave, across from Fant’s. The shop is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., inviting browsers to work their way through booths of furniture, glassware, and collectibles gathered from more than a dozen independent dealers. Reusing a former clothing store’s building gave the antique mall a ready-made retail layout, and the address across from Fant’s keeps it anchored in one of the more recognizable stretches of Gunter Ave.

The shop is owned by Donna, a retired teacher who built King’s Row into a multi-dealer antique mall housing 16 dealers, herself included. She has described the mix as an eclectic one that works well together, pairing longtime vendors with newer additions who bring their own specialties to the floor. That structure means the merchandise on display is not controlled by a single buyer’s taste, but reflects the combined collections of more than a dozen people who each stock their own booth. By the shop’s third year in business, that dealer roster had settled into a stable group, giving the mall a consistent core of vendors even as individual booths rotate their merchandise week to week.

Furniture makes up a large part of the inventory, spanning a wide range of styles rather than one narrow aesthetic. Shoppers can find shabby chic pieces alongside primitive and painted furniture, traditional case goods, straightforward vintage finds, and mid-century items, often within a few booths of each other. Glassware fills out much of the rest of the floor, joined by hand-crafted jewelry, scarves, and purses from dealers who work in smaller decorative goods rather than furniture. Lampshades and custom-made coffee tables round out the selection, and because Guntersville sits on the Tennessee River at Lake Guntersville, nautical-themed pieces show up regularly among the décor, a nod to the lake culture that shapes so much of the town’s retail.

One booth at King’s Row stands out for its focus on framed oil paintings by known artists, run by dealers Kay and Howard. Rather than simply hanging the paintings for sale, the couple provides research and biographical documentation on the artists whose work they carry, giving buyers a sense of who painted a piece and where it fits into an artist’s body of work. That kind of curation is part of what separates a multi-dealer antique mall like King’s Row from a general secondhand shop, since individual dealers bring their own expertise to the specific categories they collect.

Because each dealer restocks and rearranges independently, the overall selection at King’s Row is described as constantly changing, meaning a booth that was full of primitive furniture one visit might be turned over to painted decor and collectibles the next. Donna has noted that her dealers run the range from quirky to traditional, which keeps the shop from settling into any single look and gives repeat visitors a reason to come back and see what has turned over since their last trip through the aisles. As a retired teacher turned shop owner, Donna has spent years building relationships with the dealers who fill her booths, and that continuity shows in how she talks about the mix of personalities and specialties represented under one roof.

King’s Row Antiques keeps in touch with regulars through Facebook and Twitter, posting updates on new arrivals as dealers rotate their booths. For anyone furnishing a lake house, hunting for a specific piece of mid-century furniture, or simply looking to spend an afternoon browsing, the shop’s location on Gunter Ave puts it within an easy walk of the rest of downtown Guntersville’s shops and restaurants. The nautical decor that regularly turns up among the booths reflects how closely the shop’s inventory tracks the interests of a lake community, where furnishing a home often means finding pieces that fit a waterfront lifestyle as much as a particular decade or design trend.