On a Tuesday morning in late October, Sheila Youngblood got in her Range Rover and headed past fields of grazing horses toward Marburger Farm, in Round Top, Texas. The morning drizzle had just let up, and yellow wildflowers dotted the roadside. Soon, traffic slowed to a crawl, and the wildflowers were replaced by tents full of a bewildering array of merchandise. For most of the year, Round Top has an official population of eighty-seven, but in October and March an estimated hundred thousand visitors come here to visit a sprawling antique market, one of the biggest in the world.
Shoppers have been drawn to Round Top since a pair of Houston socialites hosted the town’s inaugural sale, in 1968. In the early nineties, Youngblood visited the fair for the first time with her grandmother. “It was very small, just a select few buildings and fields,” she said. “But there was just this spirit of treasure hunting.” (As Youngblood recalls, her grandmother bought so many lamps, rugs, and assorted bric-a-brac that she had to tie her Lincoln Continental’s door closed with her purse strap.)
Other antique markets around the country have closed, casualties of the shift to online shopping, but the fair in Round Top has become only bigger. Although it still has the reputation of being a flea-market town, Round Top is transforming into an upscale shopping mecca. This can make visiting feel a little surreal: it’s a place that insists on its quaintness even as it has rapidly outgrown it. As the traffic inched forward, Youngblood pointed out buildings that hadn’t existed a year earlier. “That’s new,” she said, peering out of the window at a barnlike structure made of artfully rusty corrugated tin, part of a new shopping complex. “I think this guy is in the process of adding nine buildings.”
Youngblood has a throaty voice and a penchant for over-the-top looks; the night I met her, she was hosting a dinner party for a hundred people, to which she wore a yellow caftan, a two-foot-high floral headdress, a cascade of necklaces, and a turquoise ring the size of a hockey puck. “She’s the grandmother of Round Top,” the fashion designer Lela Rose told me, then quickly corrected herself. “Not in terms of age, though! She’s . . . the grande dame of Round Top.” Shopping in the town can be overwhelming—there is no one central market but, rather, dozens of different venues, such as Marburger Farm, each with its own schedule and its own collection of venders. Youngblood, a Texas native, has become a kind of unofficial Round Top ambassador, guiding visitors through the chaos. She has shopped with celebrities she prefers not to name (according to gossip, they include Gwen Stefani and the designer Kelly Wearstler), and with people who are less known but no less wealthy. “It’s mostly people who have second, third homes—if you’re buying for multiple houses, this is the place to do it,” Youngblood told me.
We arrived at Marburger before the official opening at 9 A.M. Groups of women clustered around the tents’ perimeter, angling for a glimpse of the merchandise inside, fizzy with anticipatory energy. Youngblood had a shopping agenda for the day: she needed furnishings for a small bar called Grandma’s Clam that she planned to open in Austin. “It’ll be kind of raunchy but sophisticated, very grandma, like a Palm Beach estate sale,” she said. Youngblood was joined by her friend David Mendoza, an Austin entrepreneur and bar owner who, as he attempted to explain to me, “also designs brands for brands.” He was shopping for several “bar concepts,” one his own and the others belonging to client-friends. “One is, like, a Chateau Marmont-Spanish-nineteen-thirties-mohair-sofas-fringe-on-the-pillows kind of vibe. Another is a hard-door dressy night club, very black glass, white orchids. Basically, I want it to look like an Y.S.L. Opium ad from the seventies,” he said. A third bar, which he planned to open in Austin later this year, was inspired by ancient Rome, just before the fall of the Empire: “Everyone talks about how Austin is the fastest-growing city, but it can all backfire in an instant. I want to pull from that tension. Like, get it while you can.”
At nine, shoppers flooded the tents. Mendoza and Youngblood walked swiftly, scanning the merchandise, occasionally pausing to greet an acquaintance. (“Where did we go last time, when I bought that fabulous sleigh?” a woman in a fringed jacket asked Youngblood.) Mendoza stopped to eye a pair of fat-cheeked cherubs carved from wood. “That’s a vibe,” he said appreciatively. “I’m so into those,” Youngblood said. They were less impressed by a booth stocked with teak furniture upholstered in white bouclé. “I’m already asleep,” Mendoza said. “That’s why I don’t worry about getting here early,” Youngblood said. “No one wants what I want.” A dealer acquaintance waved her over. “You’ve got to see this, it’s so you,” he enthused. The object in question was a twelve-foot taxidermy crocodile wearing a saddle and bridle, its long mouth open in an evil grin. “What? This is incredible,” Youngblood said. She seemed briefly tempted. “But what am I going to do with this?” she asked. She decided against the crocodile, but quickly racked up other purchases: a cane-and-pencil-reed cabinet, a large stippled-glass Venetian mirror (“I love the brokenness of it”), a taxidermy flamingo, and a set of V.I.P.-themed cocktail glasses. In about forty-five minutes, she spent a little less than ten thousand dollars.
By 10:30 A.M., some shoppers were sipping glasses of rosé. Many were wearing the unofficial Round Top uniform: wide-brimmed hat, flowy floral dress, and boots. “It was quilted jackets last season. I was counting the quilted jackets,” one designer told me. “Now it’s those metallic boots. And cowboy hats with stuff stuck in them,” her friend said. (The metallic boots in question, which were everywhere, are designed by Miron Crosby and cost twelve hundred dollars.)
At lunch, Youngblood sat down with Arvin Olano, a fresh-faced Los Angeles content creator with manicured nails and blocky tortoiseshell glasses. Olano started his design-focussed YouTube channel during the pandemic, posting videos with titles like “10 Luxurious IKEA Products Stylist Approved” and “Best & Worst New Target Spring 2022 Decor & Furniture.” “Then I discovered vintage,” he said. For the fair, he was trying out a new technique: custom-made “Sold” stickers printed with his name—that way, shoppers who came after him would see what he’d bought.
The crowds at Round Top were a testament to the market in vintage goods, which surged during the pandemic. “The consumption was just unreal,” Mark Dooley, a longtime Round Top dealer, told me. “You could sell literally anything.” I heard various explanations for this phenomenon: supply-chain issues made buying new items unreliable; travel restrictions meant that wealthy Texans were doing more of their shopping closer to home; after too much time spent glued to screens, people were hungry for objects with a patina and a history. A dealer and designer named Amelia Tarbet sources most of her merchandise in Europe. “It’s getting so hard to find decent stuff,” she told me. “What I’m paying for things now is what I would have retailed them for twenty-four months ago. The influencers are hitting vintage hard-core, and pieces can get so trendy so quickly. Round Top has become this gold rush—sometimes it feels like the stock market.”
But the fair’s popularity as a see-and-be-seen destination doesn’t always translate to increased sales. “This show is just a pressure cooker,” a Midwestern dealer, who asked me not to use his name, said. The tents were full of tipsy would-be shoppers taking selfies, but the buying wasn’t as brisk as he’d hoped. “I’m trying not to panic,” he said. “People don’t want to buy from a sad guy. They want to buy from someone who’s, like, ‘Oh, this is just my hobby.’ But this is how I feed my kids.”
When I told people I was going to meet the mayor of Round Top, they seemed to expect I was in for a charmingly small-town experience. (“Is the mayor a dog?” a friend asked.) In fact, the mayor is a forty-three-year-old property developer from Houston named Mark Massey, who has played a pivotal role in the development—or overdevelopment—of the town. Houston and Austin are among the country’s fastest-growing cities; Round Top, an agricultural community situated halfway between the two—about a ninety-minute drive from either—is in the midst of a building boom. Land that sold for ten thousand dollars an acre eight years ago now goes for ten times as much. Across town, hayfields have been replaced by ranchette developments, and the town is full of new construction that tries, with varying levels of success, to look old.
I met Massey at the Compound, former pastureland that he had converted into a “multi-acre master-planned event-and-entertainment venue.” The Compound’s central building is a white barn with affirmations painted on its eaves: “Dance Proud”; “Be Kind”; “Say Howdy”; “Dream Big”; “Hug Puppies.” We sat in a gazebo bar that was serving a steady stream of pre-noon drinkers. Massey grew up in Houston; during the summers, he’d visit his grandparents’ farm in Round Top for a taste of country life. “You know, fishing, four-wheelers, all that fun stuff,” he said. Massey was working for a developer in Beverly Hills when, in 2010, his mother proposed a family project: they would buy up some old buildings around a historic square in town, restore them, and rent them out to small independent merchants. “That leased out, like, overnight, it seemed,” he said. The town, he realized, had potential. Round Top had what people wanted: “that Hamptons-Aspen-Santa Fe-Marfa kind of feel, you know, that elevated small town,” he said.
Since then, Massey has gone on to develop several more town squares in Round Top, including the Compound. (The others are named for the area’s early German mercantile families: Henkel Square, Minden Square, Fricke Square, Rummel Square.) To assemble them, Massey scoured the countryside for visually pleasing old buildings—“just a quaint cottage look with some character”—to relocate and repurpose. “They put these giant steel beams underneath and lift the house up on a truck,” he said. “Sometimes, depending on the size, they’ll cut the house into pieces. So it’s literally, like, big sections of house moving down this two-lane highway. They have to raise the power lines. It’s crazy. People will pull off the road to take pictures.” Visitors occasionally assume that the developments have been around since the town’s founding.
In 2020, Massey was elected Round Top’s mayor, winning fifty-four votes to his opponent’s thirty-six. His affection for historic preservation has helped insure that, despite the rapid pace of development, Round Top maintains its carefully cultivated image. More than anywhere else I’ve been, it feels like a small town in a Lifetime movie, where neighbors wave hello and there’s not a vape shop, CrossFit studio, or Dollar General to be seen. “People want that life style—going out West, having property, having critters, living off the land,” Massey explained. “That Western kind of pioneer spirit. I think it’s a big deal right now.”
After the Marburger opening, Youngblood hosted another huge dinner party at Rancho Pillow, a hotel-venue compound she opened in 2016. Rancho Pillow has a colorful, geographically indiscriminate aesthetic, like an upscale honky-tonk in a Mexican beach town; there’s an air-conditioned tepee, a heated saltwater wading pool, and a bathhouse with “Listen” painted on its tin roof.
At dinner, I sat across from the jewelry designer Kendra Scott, a regular “guest shark” on “Shark Tank,” who was at Round Top buying for Yellow Rose, her new ranch-inspired brand. “It’s about putting the cowgirl front and center,” she said. She showed me a picture of one of her purchases from the fair: an adult-size mechanical horse from the nineteen-fifties. (In four days of shopping, Scott amassed enough items to fill three trailers.) The look of the moment, she believed, was something rugged but refined. “You know, ‘Yellowstone,’ and how everybody thinks cowboys are sexy now? And cowgirls!” she said. “People want those Beth Dutton vibes. You can be tough and sexy. Like, I can run a billion-dollar brand and then go get on my horse along with my sexy cowboy husband—that’s a great life.”
A lanky, graying man sitting across from Scott shook his head. His name is Evan Voyles, and he described himself as a “recovering dealer” living in Austin. He was cynical about what Round Top had become. “To call it a theme park would be generous,” he said. “There’s interesting stuff in there, but we’ve undermined it. It used to be old buildings, small buildings, small roads. It wasn’t a feeding frenzy. Maybe it’s just that I’m getting old, but the stuff isn’t looking so good to me anymore.” Voyles said that, in the early nineties, he had briefly owned the world’s largest collection of vintage cowboy boots, which he’d acquired by travelling the country, scouring secondhand shops. He’d helped supply the market with old boots, then watched it get overcapitalized. Now Los Angeles boutiques sell mediocre Tony Lama boots from the nineties for hundreds of dollars, the thrift stores are full of fast fashion, and it is nearly impossible to find hidden treasures anymore. Everyone seems to know, or think they know, what things were worth. “It’s just like a herd of buffalo builds up over eons, but all it takes is six crazy guys and a market for it to be destroyed in a matter of years,” Voyles said.
I wandered inside to the living room, which was decorated with Youngblood’s antique-fair finds—faded rugs, wrought-iron candelabras. At one edge of the room, a well-worn Western saddle hung from a wooden beam. It was covered with circular pieces of mirror, like a D.I.Y. cowboy disco ball. Youngblood told me later that it had decorated a dance hall in Kansas in the nineteen-twenties. It was beautiful and strange, and in that moment I desperately wanted to possess it—an old object, full of all the magic I was missing. ♦
