Round Top, Texas, population 90, is a sleepy town with one traffic light, a gas station that doubles as the town grocery and hardware store, a handful of mom-and-pop restaurants, and local shops that mostly wait until the weekend to open for business. “If you’re driving through Round Top on a normal day, you may not even see another car passing down the road,” says Ashley Williams, who lives in a suburb outside of Houston but has a weekend home here.
Three times a year, all of that changes. This little town in the country happens to be the site of the phenomenon loosely known as the Round Top Antique Show — “the show,” for short — where antique dealers from around the world bring merchandise for sale to interior designers, curiosity seekers, and others who just want to get in on the fun. During the big shows in the fall and spring, along with a smaller winter show, Round Top and the neighboring towns along Highway 237 are transformed into about 20 miles of freestanding venues and tents packed with vendors selling everything from high-end European antique furniture to vintage cowboy boots. In one tent, you might find a $12,000 French 18th-century Louis XVI desk, while a few miles down the road, away from the bigger, more exclusive vendors, vintage toys are all the rage.
Williams loves to watch it all roll into town. “About a month before the show starts, you’ll start to see a lot of cars coming down the road, and all the trucks, trailers, and RVs headed in,” she says. “You’ll start to see the tents popping up, along with new places to go eat and drink.
“This little town becomes a full-blown, functioning antique festival overnight.”
“Disneyland for Antiquing”
The show began in 1968 with about two dozen dealers, but “it was way less sophisticated than it is now,” says Stephanie Layne Disney, who grew up shopping the show and whose family later acquired the venue known as The Original Round Top Antique Fair, or more commonly “The Big Red Barn,” as well as another prominent venue, Blue Hills. “The way Round Top looked just 10 years ago versus how it looks now … there’s so much to it,” Disney says, adding that today more than 100,000 people from all over the world come to the show — for the antiques but also for the special events, the people watching and celebrity spotting (Disney confirms that Matthew McConaughey and Gwen Stefani have turned out, though there are unconfirmed rumors of many others), and the full show experience.
“It’s unbelievable the number of people who come and the amount of money coming through this very rural place,” she says. “You couldn’t find what you find at Round Top anywhere else in the world, because you have such a huge amount of merchandise all in one place. I joke and say it’s like Disneyland for antiquing.”
Ginger Curtis, founder and owner of Dallas/Forth Worth-based Urbanology Designs, has been coming for about 12 years and calls it one of her all-time favorite things to do. For the most recent show, in October 2023, she brought her entire team. “It was two things — it was ‘Let’s go on a scavenger hunt and find treasures’ but also a way to do a fun team activity. We rented a house, watched movies, did girls’ nights, and of course we put on sneakers and went to Round Top.”
They ultimately left with a trailer full of acquisitions along with stories about the thrill of the hunt. ”You make all these wild memories,” she says. “I remember holding onto this one vintage painting for dear life while bouncing around in the back of a golf cart with a big smile on my face,” she says. “And when the painting was installed, I got to share that story with my client, and it was fun. I think a lot of that is the appeal.”
The Round Top Look
As the show has grown exponentially, so have new events and distinct characteristics. Venues now host “sip and shop” nights, book signings by famous designers, elaborate dinners, expert designer panels and other opportunities for vendors and designers to network or for shoppers to enjoy. There are “prom nights,” and there’s more than one — the original Round Top Dance Hall Prom and the newer Junk-o-Rama Prom, which doubles as a fashion show for vintage and repurposed prom dresses.
There are fashion shows proper, which touch on another defining aspect of the show — dressing the part. “Round Top has its own look,” Disney explains. “It could be everything from Western to eclectic. It’s long-flowing dresses and brim hats and high-end cowboy boots. … I like to remind my friends before they come, ‘Wear your Round Top!’”
Disney adds that lately the show has begun attracting more vendors selling clothing, so “You may not come to Round Top looking like you belong at Round Top, but you’re going to leave looking like you do.”
The Influencer
Analisa Mauermann Kennedy started going to the show several years ago on a whim when a friend invited her to come along. “It’s been in my blood ever since,” she says. After a series of surgeries made it harder for her to cover a lot of ground on foot, “my husband bought me a little red hot-rod scooter, so nothing has stopped me yet.”
Given the sheer number of visitors, accommodations can be hard to come by in Round Top during the show, so like many others, Kennedy has sometimes arrived via RV and enjoyed finding different places to plant herself and soak in the experience. More recently, she’s started gathering groups to split an Airbnb, another popular option. The area is also starting to offer more choices, including new boutique hotels attracted by the show and the area’s growing cachet as a weekend retreat in the offseason.
Kennedy loves exploring the antiques, along with hand-crafted wares and almost anything vintage, but what really gets her excited is the camaraderie and how groups of strangers have started coming together through social media to help one another make great finds.
“Generally, you have a list of what you’re looking for,” Kennedy says. “So it becomes kind of a scavenger hunt, and it’s so much fun. During the show, people will post on Facebook, ‘I’m looking for such and such, has anyone seen one?’ And then you have eyes out there everywhere.”
Last year, Kennedy set out determined to find a vintage Savemaster griddle, the kind her grandmother had used to make Kennedy’s favorite biscuits. When she couldn’t find one, she put out the call. When that didn’t work, “I decided to be a little more aggressive with the hunt,” she says. “I put out there my story of growing up watching my grandmother making ‘Nana biscuits.’ I had a picture of the biscuits and the griddle I wanted, and the response was off the charts. People wrote, ‘Oh my gosh, that is so cool, I’ll keep an eye out. Would you share the recipe?’”
She did, and a woman connected her with a dealer on site selling vintage cookware. He had two Savemaster griddles — only now, after Kennedy’s post, lots of shoppers wanted them. The woman who had told Kennedy where to find it ended up buying the other one and shared with her the vendor’s response: “What is the deal with these griddles? I could have sold 20. People are wanting them for ‘Nana biscuits.’”
After that, Kennedy grew even bolder, giving vendors advice about what people want to buy. When she found vendors selling beautiful African indigo cloth without much success, she suggested using the cloth to make shirts and ponchos. “When we went back to the next show, the gentleman named Abdul I’d spoken with had listened and brought in all of these wonderful Serapi tops he had made. Then we found more tents with racks of clothing made from this material. I thought, ‘Look at the influence we had from a year ago!’”
Kennedy has dozens of stories like these, and she’s created so many bonds with Round Top vendors that she makes a point of bringing them hot meals and other gifts to show appreciation for their efforts.
It’s fair to say the show might have started out as well-kept secret, but it’s far from a secret now. Yet even as it continues to grow, it retains its ineffable mystery, because no two experiences are alike. And when a show wraps and the trucks start to roll back down Highway 237, everyone takes a piece of the show with them, whether tangible or experiential. Urbanology Designs’ Curtis says it’s usually both.
“It’s fun and always wildly challenging,” Curtis says. “But then we can pepper these amazing pieces we find with the stories of Round Top. The stories and history add so much value.”
Round Top Mayor Mark Massey — who not only helps make sure the event runs smoothly but owns an antique venue within the show — describes the dichotomy between pre- and post-show Round Top as a tale of two towns.
“When the show is over and everyone packs up, the tents come down, the dealers load out and the dust settles, Round Top gets back to a really charming, quintessential, small Texas town. So it really is two worlds.”
