Our history has been long and productive. We originally started as an upscale auction house (Premier Auction Gallery) in the Waldo district of Kansas City Missouri. Our bi-weekly Saturday night auctions became very popular and earned us a loyal following. We offered a comfortable environment and honest auctioning. We were also the first auction house in the city with it's own website.
We then started adding some variety. We imported containers from Indonesia, England & France and held priced tag sales in our gallery between auction dates. We would also occasionally bring one or several estates to the gallery and have an estate tag sale instead of an auction. We were very flexible!
As we grew, we saw the need to sometimes provide our auction and estate sale services outside our gallery setting. People often enjoy seeing the items for sale in their original homes. It also saved the client the cost of moving everything to our gallery. Online internet auctions also entered our mix.
In 2009, as our onsite estate sale, live auction & internet auction services grew, we decided to close the gallery in Waldo. We opened a retail shop, Mockingbird Home Furnishings, on the historic Independence Missouri square and added Mockingbird to our name (we chose Mockingbird after Harper Lee's amazing novel.) Although after 6 years we closed that shop, we continued our retail side with Mockingbird Mercantile, in the historic West Bottoms Antique District of Kansas City Missouri. And now our retail shop is in our own newly created Gillham House Antiques in midtown Kansas City.
And that brings us to today. Interest in live auctions, at least in the Kansas City area, seems to be waning. We've dropped Premier from our name (everyone else is calling themselves premier) and now concentrate on estate sales and internet auctions. We still do an occasional live auction as needed, but it is always simulcast on the internet. So though our name has evolved since 1994, we are still the same people, trying to do our best for everyone.
Can't wait to see you at our sale. Setup was 336.