My car idles, part of the patient single-file throng waiting to turn on to the grounds of the Peninsula’s Filoli estate, the fourth of five stops for Antiques Roadshow’s new season, filmed last June. Little do I or producers know it yet, but among the items waiting for appraisal is a 1976 mock-up for the Apple II computer, which Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs unveiled the following year. Apt for a Silicon Valley taping.
To film its 27th season, Roadshow dropped into Woodside after earlier visits to Nashville, Boise and Santa Fe, and before its final destination: Shelburne, Vermont. While Roadshow filmed at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento back in 2019, Filoli also marks the production’s first stop in the Bay Area since its visit to Santa Clara in 2014. “We like a city we’ve never been to before,” executive producer Marsha Bemko says midway through the day’s filming over the country estate’s lush grounds, where light boxes and tripods make for modern moments among English Renaissance gardens.
In addition to the three hour-long episodes that will be produced from this visit, leftovers from all five cities will be used for PBS’s Junk in the Trunk, putting Filoli squarely back on the small screen this year.
For the Love of Old
Antiques are on trend, as is the resale market overall thanks to the combination of supply chain woes, inflation and an ever-increasing sustainability mindset. From high-end dealing to the everyday thrills of secondhand scores, the industry is far from new. But younger generations may have something to do with Roadshow’s newfound TikTok fame. The show — PBS’s most-watched ongoing series, with approximately 6 million weekly viewers in 2021 — launched an account on the platform near the end of that year and now has more than 830,000 followers. I, for one, cannot pass up a detour to peruse what someone has decided to part with. I find the discovery of a used and useful treasure uniquely satisfying, be it a gently worn dollhouse for my younger daughter, classic chapter books for my older daughter, a blue-and-white porcelain cookie jar for my mother, or a milk glass decanter for myself — all merrily scooped up in recent months.
Interior designer Kari McIntosh can relate. In June, she opened The Atelier, an antiques storefront for her Burlingame-based design business. “Some of my younger clients are more interested in the sustainable aspect and not having disposable things,” says McIntosh, whose mother ran an antiques store in Bakersfield and worked with some of the same vendors McIntosh continues to today. “I like to feature things that I would want to use in a project,” she says of The Atelier, which offers a range of price points and items well-suited to styling: accessories, side tables, lamps, pillows. “Those are things that move quickly. I think it’s easy to come in and see something you love and take it home if it’s low commitment.”
A Story to Tell — and Learn
While Roadshow isn’t about commerce, which is strictly forbidden on set, it is in the trade of storytelling. An appraisal can entail compelling elements: a defining era; a distinct setting, perhaps in another part of the country or the world; and a central figure — known or not — who first owned the relic.
In the five months leading up to the filming at Filoli, 17,000 people entered the show’s annual ticket sweepstakes. Of the 2,541 guests who were lucky enough to line up an appraisal, each could bring a couple of items to be evaluated by one of 70 appraisers across 23 categories — from ancient art to silver, furniture to sculpture, sports memorabilia to musical instruments. Certain objects are categories unto themselves: dolls, photographs, watches. On this day, Roadshow will film a total of 127 items for its formal and snapshot appraisals.
When I check in at triage, a station set up under a canopy of mature trees, I remove the two items I’ve thought long and hard over. Most contenders I assessed at home seemed sentimental yet commonplace: a reproduction cameo brooch from my Italian grandmother, a pair of Polish porcelain salt and pepper shakers snagged for $10, a Nancy Ann Storybook Doll my daughter couldn’t live without at a block sale. I finally landed on an Art Deco ring from the estate case of a Los Gatos jewelry store and a set of game plates my mother purchased at an antiques shop years ago. At Filoli, my card is stamped accordingly: Jewelry and Pottery & Porcelain.
From all the items that pass through triage, three Roadshow producers, including Bemko, will select contenders for filming, perhaps things particularly rare or wonderful, based on recommendations from appraisers. If chosen, guests wait in a makeshift greenroom on-site so that their appraisals — and reactions — can be captured on camera. The aim is authenticity, aided by appraisers themselves who pay their own way and volunteer their time on set.
“Most of the experts on staff, although we have a good amount of new experts here today, are veterans, and they’re pitching things they really want to talk about,” Bemko explains. “Like David Lackey, he pitched me these Havilland cups. Why are they so great? They’re not demitasse, there’s so many, all these different patterns, this and that. But they’re really pretty. I’ve turned down more valuable things today, but these are different. And David Lackey was so excited about them. That’s contagious. I get that excitement from David Lackey when he’s pitching me. Our audience gets that excitement from our experts because they’re passionate about what they talk about.”
True Value
Typically, guests travel within a 100-mile radius of a filming location. “We do have people who plan their vacation around Roadshow,” says Demee Gambulos, the show’s director of brand marketing and audience development. When asked if there is anything she is expecting to see from this pocket of Northern California, Gambulos, who has been working with Roadshow for eight years, says that aside from the show’s “Knock Our Socks Off!” contest segment, it’s always a total surprise, adding, “We put the reality in reality television.”
As Gambulos and I wend along the path to the back of the Woodside estate, with organized scores of guests gingerly carrying bags of items or a canvas tucked under an arm, the tables with the longest lines are Paintings and Collectibles. We arrive at Jewelry, where Kevin Zavian, a specialist with Doyle in New York, looks at my ring, bouncing its weight in his palm, and rattles off characteristics visible to his third-generation jeweler’s eye: that it’s likely 90 percent platinum, 10 percent iridium; the top has been punched out and is therefore mass produced — perhaps in New Jersey or on Long Island, where such production was common — and finished by hand; it most likely dates between 1915 and 1925.
The center stone is a quarter-carat, with a pinpoint at its base. “That tells me it’s original to the ring, when it was made,” Zavian says, looking through a jeweler’s loupe to count the small surrounding diamonds. “There’s a carat of goods in the piece, and that’s exactly what’s there.” As he hands the ring back to me, he adds he would likely list it at auction for $500 to $700, plus commission and tax, which comes close to what I purchased it for a few years back.
Zavian’s swift assessment skills also have been honed over 27 years with Roadshow, since its first season aired on PBS in 1997. “I have to say, this is one of the prettiest places we’ve ever been,” he says of filming at Filoli. “Some places speak to you when you get there. I feel like I’m in Italy.”
After thanking Zavian for his time, we walk around Filoli’s reflecting pool to the Pottery and Porcelain tables and meet Lackey, who owns David Lackey Antiques and Fine Jewelry in Houston, and has been appraising the category for Roadshow since day one. “I haven’t missed any years at all,” he clarifies later by phone. “For about 20 years, I didn’t miss a single city.”
As I unpack my mother’s game plates, another set brought by a guest in line next to me has already caught Lackey’s eye. Pamela tells me about her six uniquely painted plates once owned by her great-grandparents back in Brookline, Massachusetts. “My grandfather did wildlife paintings,” she says, mentioning credits like Look magazine and suspecting he connected personally with the artist, as the plates have a signed provenance. “I had them stored,” she shares, likely for half a century. “I even sent a picture to Sotheby’s. I’ve been trying to find out about them.”
When Lackey turns to my six provenance-less plates, he says, “When you see it’s stamped ‘French Porcelain,’ you know it’s not French and you know it’s not porcelain.” Instead, they were likely made here in the U.S., either in Ohio or West Virginia — areas that were ideal for pottery production during the late 19th century due to the availability of raw materials like clay as well as an experienced workforce, as porcelain and pottery makers from Europe immigrated to America and shared skills honed over centuries. It was a time, Lackey explains, when products made in Europe were more desirable to consumers than utilitarian, American-made goods. (Later, Lackey also confirms that the French China Company was located in Sebring, Ohio, and used the mark found on my plates.)
“Six is a half-set,” he says, adding that $75 would be a generous retail price.
While neither of my items is filmed or worth more money than suspected — unlike the day’s Ansaldo Poggi viola, worth up to $330,000! — I love knowing details about a ring I wear daily and plates that will now remind me of both my mother and a time in American history. “We find people mostly don’t sell their items, if highly valued,” Gambulos says. “They mostly want to know the stories behind them.”
Those stories are the real assessments each guest can take home, after sharing space with so many feel-good fans and personal treasures. “We spend all year on that,” Bemko adds, before returning to the work of the day. “Because this is an event for most people, not a taping day. We want to make sure you have a great day.”
