THE PALM BEACH SHOW

The Palm Beach Show is the season’s fair for antiques, jewellery, fine art and design, held over Presidents’ Day weekend, when the island is at its fullest.

It is held across the lagoon in West Palm Beach, where Palm Beach has always done its making and its trading.

The Workshops

Palm Beach was furnished, in the first place, by a man who made a good share of its antiques himself.

Addison Mizner came south in the winter of 1918 as the guest of Paris Singer, heir to the sewing-machine fortune, to recover from an injury. Singer set him to design a convalescent hospital for soldiers returning from the war. The war ended before it opened, and it became the Everglades Club, the building that gave the island the Mediterranean style it has worn ever since.

The houses that followed needed roof tiles, ironwork, cast stone and furniture that could not be bought in Florida, so Mizner built workshops across the lagoon in West Palm Beach to make them. The furniture included what the firm called “distinctive copies of antiques,” distressed to look older than they were. He went to Spain each year and came back with the real thing too, and in the houses the two stood side by side.

A great deal of what was admired as old in Palm Beach was new, and some of it was very good. The island learned early to ask where a thing had come from.

The Show

The show began in the early 2000s at the county convention centre, and it has become the one place in the season where most of what a Palm Beach house is furnished from can be seen on a single floor: furniture, silver, porcelain, Asian art, glass, clocks, paintings, and a great deal of jewellery.

Its old name put jewellery first, and jewellery is still its strength.

Dealers apply and are vetted before they are admitted. They come from Europe as well as America, and some ship an entire stand across the Atlantic for the week.

What to Know

The show opens with a preview on the Thursday evening, which is the time to see the floor before it is sold.

Presidents’ Day weekend is one of the few long weekends of the American winter, and it brings the East Coast south. The island is at its fullest, and so are its restaurants.

Antique Row, a stretch of dealers along South Dixie Highway in West Palm Beach, is worth an afternoon the same week. It keeps an evening of its own each April, when its shops stay open late.

The Court

The Palm Beach Show is not the Court’s own. Places at the preview, and introductions to the dealers a member wants to see, are sought on a member’s behalf, and the Court arranges the whole of the visit: getting there, where to stay on the island, and the table afterward. A member who comes to buy should say so beforehand, so that the right dealers are expecting them.

How one becomes a member is set out under Admission.