What it’s actually like
Every other room on the block of Main Street just west of Scottsdale Road sells art made by living people, or by the Western masters of the last century. Esses Rare Objects D’Art, at 7169 East Main, sells the century before that. Its specialty is nineteenth-century European and Asian art: one-of-a-kind antiques, sculpture, oil paintings and the category the French call objets d’art — the small, fine, decorative pieces that furnished a well-off household before anyone in Scottsdale had a house.
The Scottsdale Arts District lists the shop as Esses Rare Objects and D’art Antiques, under one address and one phone number, and the name on the door is the more useful description: these are objects, chosen one at a time, not editions or a gallery roster. Between David Yarrow’s photographs on one side and DeRubeis’s metal paintings on the other, it is the quietest door on the block, and the one where the browsing is most like a treasure hunt.
The inventory is by definition one of a kind, and so is every visit. What is on the shelves on a Tuesday may be gone by Thursday, which is the nature of an antiques room and the reason collectors who know it keep coming back.
What to buy
A European sculpture. Nineteenth-century work, made for the drawing rooms of its own day and at home in a Scottsdale living room now.
An Asian decorative object. The other half of the specialty, and the place where knowledge of period and provenance matters most; ask the dealer.
An oil painting. A nineteenth-century canvas costs differently from a new one on the same street, sometimes less, and the comparison is instructive.
An object d’art. The small things — the pieces you can carry out in a bag — are where an antiques room on a gallery street is most fun.
Parking, timing and the practical stuff
The shop is on the south side of the block of Main Street just west of Scottsdale Road, between Relévant Galleries and DeRubeis Fine Art of Metal, across from Gebert Contemporary and a few doors from The Signature Gallery. The Legacy Gallery on the corner is the landmark. Main Street parking is short-term and usually full; the free Civic Center garage off Drinkwater Boulevard is a flat five-minute walk east, and the Old Town on foot note maps the grid. The Main Street Arts District guide covers the galleries around it.
Hours are not published the way the neighboring galleries’ are, so call 480-945-8153 before you make a special trip. The Thursday ArtWalk is when the block is busiest, and the contrast with the new-art rooms is sharpest; a weekday is better for a long conversation about a single piece. If antiques are the purpose of your trip, pair this with Territorial Indian Arts & Antiques at the other end of the block for the Southwestern side of the trade, and the multi-dealer malls on South Scottsdale Road, Antique Trove and The Antique Centre, for volume.
Eat while you’re there
Malee’s Thai Bistro is a few doors west at 7131 East Main. The Sugar Bowl, a block north on Scottsdale Road, has been pink since 1958 and is itself something of an antique. The Rusty Spur Saloon across Scottsdale Road pours in a bank built in 1921, and Los Olivos on Second Street has fed the neighborhood since 1947.
How it got here
Main Street sold souvenirs and old things before it sold art. In the 1950s and 1960s, when Scottsdale was marketing itself as “The West’s Most Western Town,” the street was a row of Western-styled storefronts — curio shops, trading posts and Western wear — catering to winter visitors who came for the sun and stayed to shop. Troy’s Cowboy Art Gallery opened in 1968 as the first gallery on the street, and through the 1970s and 1980s the galleries multiplied.
The shift was gradual and nearly complete. By the 1990s downtown retail had moved from antiques to galleries, the Thursday ArtWalk — running since 1975 — had made Main Street a weekly destination for art buyers. The antiques rooms that stayed on Main Street were the specialists: Territorial Indian Arts & Antiques, with its Navajo rugs and old baskets, and dealers in fine European and Asian material like Esses.
That specialism is what lets an antiques room survive on a gallery street. A general antiques shop would struggle on a street priced for galleries; a dealer in nineteenth-century European and Asian objects, selling to the same collectors who walk the galleries on a Thursday night, can. The collectors who buy a Western bronze at Legacy or a contemporary abstract at Gebert are often furnishing houses that want something older on the side table.
In the 2020s the block west of Scottsdale Road has become one of the most varied in the district — Western heavyweights, academic realists, Yarrow photographs, metal paintings — and Esses is the one door where the newest thing on the shelf is more than a century old.