To walk into Julia Boston’s beautiful shop is a sensory experience. Early seventeenth to mid nineteenth-century paintings, as well as sets of elegantly framed antique prints, hang on the walls. Elsewhere, there are stunning French commodes, consoles, chairs, tables, and exquisite blue and white faience chargers and cachepots. There are so many of the very highest quality European antiques to see that it takes time to absorb them all-but it wasn’t always so…

Julia steps out from behind her desk with a welcoming smile, always accompanied by her beloved lurcher, Lucy, to explain to MILIEU about how she got started.

Julia’s first job was as a picture restorer and gilder, where she was surrounded by beautiful paintings, which she couldn’t then afford to buy. So she started to buy antique prints, learned how to frame them, and started selling to interior designers and friends. This business grew large enough for her to take premises in Chelsea, in London, a neighborhood where she was surrounded by other long- established and up-and-coming antique dealers. She started buying early eighteenth to mid nineteenth-century antiques from France-always a passion of hers, and this proved a very desirable market for top interiors designers and collectors from all over the world.

To this growing inventory, she added her beloved blue and white faience pieces, planters, cachepots, wine coolers, plates, and platters. Prints were (and still are) framed in-house. She continued to buy quality collections of prints, and then started buying the very paintings she had started out restoring in her early career.

Julia also has a love of tapestries and has been buying seventeenth and eighteenth-century French and Flemish tapestries for many years, so that her shop has now become a highly sought after destination in London for the very highest caliber interior designers, collectors, and faithful clients.

Her husband, Charles Edwards, a noted lighting designer, persuaded Julia to move to better and more expansive premises. In 2002, she moved into her first shop on the Kings Road in London. The shop has expanded over the years, and is now two floors of expertly laid out vignettes of tapestries, oil paintings, sets of prints, furniture, lights, and accessories. Julia and her goddaughter, Sigi, along with Eric Faveri, who does all the framing, make up a professional team who handles everything from the photography and website, to sales and shipping, and, of course, the buying.

To learn more, please visit juliaboston.com.

For more Industry Profiles, click here.

PRODUCED AND WRITTEN BY KATRIN CARGILL

PHOTOS COURTESY OF JULIA BOSTON ANTIQUES