In the heart of Skaneateles, New York, a village built around one of the cleanest lakes in the Finger Lakes region, White and White Antiques has spent more than five decades earning the trust of collectors, decorators, and estate executors across the Northeast. Stephen and Beverly White have run the shop from its storefront at 18 East Genesee Street for the past thirty years, a stretch of downtown that puts browsers within an easy walk of Skaneateles Lake and the village’s cluster of independent shops and cafes. Fifty five years in the antiques trade have given the couple a network of estate contacts, pickers, and fellow dealers that few newer shops can match, and that network shows up directly on the sales floor: furniture, paintings, folk art, oriental rugs, early glass, metalwork, textiles, decorative accessories, and estate jewelry spanning the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries, much of it sourced from estates scattered across the Northeastern United States rather than bought sight unseen from wholesalers.
Steve White is also a working appraiser, a skill the shop puts to direct use for customers who need an estate liquidated, a collection valued, or a single inherited piece identified before a sale. He has lectured at antique shows, historical societies, and museums on the subjects he knows best, and that same expertise travels well beyond Skaneateles. White and White regularly sets up at fine antique shows stretching from Maine to Nashville and from Virginia to Minneapolis, so pieces that pass through the Genesee Street storefront may just as easily be discovered by a collector at a show hundreds of miles away. For visitors who want the in person experience, though, the shop keeps a steady schedule: open Wednesday through Saturday from 10am to 5pm, with Monday and Tuesday available by appointment for anyone who cannot make the regular hours. Appointments and general questions go through a direct phone call or email, a level of personal access that is increasingly rare among shops of this caliber.
What sets the business apart in a region with no shortage of antique dealers is the depth of its estate connections and the breadth of categories it covers under one roof. Rather than specializing narrowly in, say, glass or furniture alone, White and White curates across the full range of a well appointed early American or European interior, which makes the shop a resource for interior designers assembling a room as much as for collectors chasing a specific maker or period. The Whites’ decades of relationships with pickers and fellow dealers mean fresh estate finds cycle through the inventory regularly rather than sitting static on the floor.
Skaneateles itself draws visitors year round for its lake views, sailing, and walkable Main Street, and White and White Antiques has become part of that destination, a stop where a weekend visitor can browse eighteenth century furniture or a piece of estate jewelry in the same afternoon as a lakeside lunch. For anyone assembling a serious antiques collection or simply furnishing a home with pieces that carry real history, White and White Antiques remains one of the most established names in the Finger Lakes antiques trade, a family run shop where five decades of estate relationships translate into a sales floor that changes with every new find.
