Relic and Rarity operates as a private antiquities gallery headquartered at 7030 Woodbine Avenue in Markham, Ontario, focusing on rare historical artifacts rather than the furniture, glassware, and household vintage typically associated with a neighborhood antique shop. According to the business’s own materials, its curated inventory spans multiple ancient civilizations and eras, including Egyptian funerary objects, Roman and Greek antiquities, Pre-Columbian relics, Asian ceramics, samurai armor, medieval artifacts, historical arms and armor, Victorian-era pieces, and religious and spiritual relics. The gallery describes itself as maintaining more than five hundred available artifacts at any given time, with over fifteen hundred pieces already placed into private and institutional collections around the world.
Unlike a typical walk-in antique store, Relic and Rarity presents itself as a specialized, appointment-driven gallery built around authentication and provenance research rather than open browsing. The business lists office hours of Monday through Friday, nine in the morning to five in the evening Eastern time, with the gallery closed on weekends, and describes its Markham address as a headquarters supporting a client base that extends well beyond the Greater Toronto Area given its stated worldwide shipping. Every piece sold is said to include a certificate of authenticity, and the gallery credits its head curator, Jordan Thomas, with leading the authentication and provenance work behind each artifact before it reaches a buyer.
The gallery’s stated reach includes placements with recognized institutions, among them the Fenimore Art Museum, and it operates a private collector early access program offering a discount to repeat or dedicated clients, a structure more common among specialized dealers and auction-adjacent galleries than general antique retailers. Relic and Rarity also maintains an active presence across Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, Pinterest, and X, using those channels to showcase individual artifacts, provenance stories, and new acquisitions to a following well beyond its Markham home base.
For Markham and the wider York Region, a business like Relic and Rarity represents a different tier of the antiques and collectibles trade, one built around scarcity, documented history, and museum-adjacent credibility rather than the browse-and-discover experience of a traditional antique mall. Markham itself has grown into one of the largest and most diverse municipalities in the Greater Toronto Area, and its Woodbine Avenue corridor sits among a broader mix of commercial and office space serving the region’s business community, a fitting setting for a gallery-style operation built more around client services, shipping, and appointment viewings than retail foot traffic.
Anyone interested in a specific category of artifact, from ancient Mediterranean pieces to Asian militaria or Victorian collectibles, is directed to the gallery’s client services, sales, or shipping contacts directly, since inventory in a business built around one-of-a-kind pieces turns over item by item rather than through repeated restocking of the same product lines. Prospective buyers researching a specific historical period or culture can also review the gallery’s certificates of authenticity and provenance documentation before purchase, a process the business positions as central to how it operates. In short, Relic and Rarity is a Markham, Ontario based antiquities gallery built around authenticated, one-of-a-kind historical artifacts, worldwide shipping, and a client-services model rather than a traditional storefront antique shop.
