Lady Jane’s Antiques

Lady Jane’s Antiques is a single-vendor antique shop on Cherokee Street, run by John Brauer, and it works the way the older shops on the Row work: one dealer, one eye, and stock chosen by somebody who has to live with what he buys.

That is worth saying plainly, because it is the difference between a shop like this and an antique mall. In a mall, a hundred booths are rented out and the quality wanders accordingly. In a single-vendor shop the buying is done by one person with a reputation to keep, and what is on the floor reflects a point of view. It also means the person behind the counter can generally tell you what a piece is, where it came from and what it should cost.

The shop runs over multiple floors, with prices in the middle of the range rather than at the collector end, and it offers shipping and delivery – which matters more than it sounds for a street that draws visitors from out of state and for anyone who has just fallen for a piece of furniture that will not go in the car.

Lady Jane’s stands at 2110 Cherokee Street, in the heart of Cherokee Antique Row, among the dealers who have made this six-block stretch the antiques district of St. Louis since the 1940s.