A lodge hall built for a fraternal order in 1927 now houses one of Rensselaer County’s larger antiques marketplaces, where Dater House and Friends Antiques spreads primitive, Americana, and country finds across two full floors at 4348 NY-150 in West Sand Lake. The building started life as a Pythian Castle, a meeting hall for the Knights of Pythias fraternal order, and its upper hall still carries traces of that original purpose in the form of stained glass windows and murals painted by C.G. Davidson. Over the decades the lower floor cycled through very different uses, at various points serving as an elementary school classroom space and later a dance studio, before Cindy Johnson and Scott saw its potential as a home for a curated multi-dealer shop and opened Dater House and Friends there in 2022.
The West Sand Lake location is the second and larger home for the Dater House name, complementing the original Dater House Antiques that Johnson has run out of a stone farmhouse on Brunswick Road in Troy since 1999. Where the Troy shop keeps chance-and-appointment hours inside its 1798 stone walls, the West Sand Lake building opens its doors every day of the week, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., putting more than 25 individually curated dealers under one roof, among them Baker and Co. Antiques, Cobbler Cottage Antiques, and The Primitive Box. Shoppers moving through the old lodge rooms will find country furniture, painted primitives, folk signage, vintage textiles, early lighting, and small decorative accessories, with new merchandise arriving from the dealer roster on close to a daily basis, so a visit in one month rarely mirrors a visit in the next.
The building itself earned a Historic Preservation Award for the restoration work that turned a century-old fraternal hall back into a functioning, visitable public space, and that history is part of what draws browsers who might otherwise pass through West Sand Lake on Route 150 without stopping. Dealers here lean toward pieces with a lived-in, hand-made character rather than polished formal antiques, the kind of primitive cupboards, dry sinks, weathervanes, and early advertising material that furnish a farmhouse or a country kitchen rather than a period parlor. The Dater House name has also become familiar to television audiences, since pieces sourced through the shops have been used as set dressing for HBO’s The Gilded Age, a credential that speaks to the depth and authenticity of the inventory moving through both locations.
For collectors who already know the Troy shop, the West Sand Lake location offers a chance to see the same eye for primitive and country antiques applied at a larger scale, spread across more square footage and more dealer booths than the original farmhouse can hold. For newcomers, the building’s own past as a Pythian Castle, complete with its painted ceremonial hall upstairs, gives the visit a second layer of interest beyond the merchandise on the shelves. Whether the draw is a specific category of early American furniture or simply an afternoon of unhurried browsing through a historic building, Dater House and Friends Antiques in West Sand Lake pairs a genuinely old structure with a constantly refreshed selection of primitive and Americana antiques from more than two dozen dealers, open daily on Route 150 between Troy and the wider Capital Region. In short, Dater House and Friends Antiques is a daily-open, multi-dealer primitive and Americana antiques marketplace inside a restored 1927 Pythian Castle in West Sand Lake, New York.
