At the corner of Route 1 and Payne Road in Scarborough, Maine, Rachel Gurley opened Gurley Antiques Gallery in 2008, building a shop whose grand, eye-catching building looks like it could pass for someone’s private estate before visitors even step through the front door. Rachel and her family are second-generation antique dealers and licensed auctioneers with more than 25 years of experience running auctions, antique shows, and estate sales throughout New England, and the Scarborough gallery at 581 US Route 1 serves as their home base of operations.
Inside, roughly 30 to 36 individual dealers, drawn from Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont, fill the gallery with a quality-focused specialty in 18th, 19th, and early 20th century antiques and decorative arts. Fine antique furniture spanning multiple period styles anchors much of the inventory, alongside estate and costume jewelry, artwork, ceramics, glassware, vintage advertising, and a rotating selection of oddities that add unexpected variety to the more formal period pieces. The gallery is also known for stocking vintage Christmas decor year-round, a specific niche that has become something of a signature alongside its broader antique offerings. Visitors passing through Scarborough on Route 1, often en route to nearby shopping destinations like Cabela’s at The Gateway Shoppes, have described spotting the building and turning in on impulse, only to find genuinely upscale, museum-quality pieces inside.
Beyond the physical gallery, the Gurley family runs Gurley Antique Shows, a well-established circuit of antique and vintage markets held throughout Maine and New Hampshire. The Bath Antique Sale, a tradition dating to the 1980s, and the Deerfield Antique Show, running since the 1990s with more than 85 dealers, are among the recurring events the family organizes, alongside a popular Thanksgiving-season antique show and sale that draws around 75 independent exhibitors. That show-running experience gives the family deep connections across the regional antique dealing community, connections that show up in the quality and authenticity of the dealers represented inside the Scarborough gallery itself.
The gallery keeps steady hours, open Wednesday through Monday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., closed Tuesdays. Being located directly on coastal Route 1 gives Gurley Antiques Gallery strong visibility for passing traffic, and its proximity to other Scarborough attractions makes it an easy stop to fold into a broader day of coastal Maine exploring.
For serious collectors seeking authenticated period antiques from a family with genuine auction-house expertise, Gurley Antiques Gallery offers one of southern Maine’s most credentialed antiquing destinations. Gurley Antiques Gallery is a 30-plus dealer antique mall on Route 1 in Scarborough, Maine, run by second-generation dealer and licensed auctioneer Rachel Gurley, specializing in 18th through 20th century antiques and decorative arts.
