Walking into Michael Millard-Lowe Antiques, it's easy to believe you've slipped into 17th-century France.
The store is dimly lit and carries the distinct smell of old wood, with end tables, dining tables, mirrors and couches filling every room, china plates and figurines crowded on the shelves. A wooden bed frame is tucked among the meticulously arranged furniture toward the back, where the lighting brightens and gives way to a wall of paintings.
But the sound of modern frustration pokes a hole in the time traveller's fantasy.
Behind the counter sits the store owner, Michael Millard-Lowe, a lanky 6-foot-8 man with neatly styled white hair, black glasses on his face, and a crisp, tailored white dress shirt paired with custom-made khaki pants, cussing at his phone as he fights to get into an auction site that won't load. He gives up, sets the phone down and stands up.
It's a quick window into the modern reality of an old-world trade, one that forced Millard-Lowe to learn a lesson that nearly sank his business early on: buy what will sell, not what he loves.
"I'll buy everything from an auction in France, for the most part. And they're going, 'Why are you buying that?' I'm like, 'Because people like it, and I can sell it, because I'm in this business to make money and not to be expressed by personal style.'" Millard-Lowe said.
It wasn't always that way.
The lesson that changed his business
Early in his career, Millard-Lowe specialized almost exclusively in 15th and 16th century furniture, considering anything made after 1700 too modern for his taste. The approach nearly ended his business before it started. While doing a show at the Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan, he sat across from another dealer, a woman who specialized in gold chalices crusted with rubies and diamonds. She sat in a director's chair, smoking cigarettes and drinking vodka out of one of her chalices.
When Millard-Lowe complained to her about his struggles to sell furniture, she gave him the advice that changed the direction of his career.
"’Honey, you're not an antique dealer to validate your own good taste. You're an antique dealer to sell what people want,’" he recalls her telling him.
Millard-Lowe said the lesson stuck, and if it wasn't for her, he’d probably be out of business by now.
The Norfolk antiques purveyor said he’s perennially fighting two persistent assumptions that may keep people away from his shop. The first is that centuries-old furniture is too fragile for everyday life. What people assume is delicate is, in fact, built to last, he said.
The second misconception is that antiques are out of reach financially.
"Antiques have to be 100 years old, that's the technical definition of antiques, and what I tell people is ‘I have stuff from $50 to $50,000,’ so I try to have something for everybody," he said. "If you can't afford an 18th century buffet from 1760, I might have a copy that's more affordable from the late 19th century or from the early 20th century, up to the 1920s."
Millard-Lowe's path to high-end European antiquing started a long way from France.
"I'm a hick from Oklahoma, and, like most people, I was in the Navy, and that's how I ended up in Norfolk," he said. "And then I went and got my master's degree in Richmond, and that's when I met my husband."
His husband is French, a connection that helped open the door to the European market. With a master's degree in banking and accounting that he wasn’t eager to use, Millard-Lowe looked instead for work that would let him travel. He spent his thirties as a traveling show dealer, pulling pieces from a storage unit to sell at events around the country. As the physical toll of hauling heavy furniture caught up with him, he moved off the road and opened his Ghent storefront more than a decade ago.
Sourcing internationally carries its own hazards. Millard-Lowe still regrets buying an 18th century terracotta pot in France years ago. The piece was in pristine condition, exactly what he wanted, until U.S. customs inspectors found a tiny fragment of a snail shell inside a clump of dirt clinging to it. Officials classified it as an invasive species risk and gave him 24 hours to ship the container back to France.
"It was horrifyingly expensive," he said. He hasn't bought another terracotta piece since.
Tariffs have introduced a newer, less predictable cost. Enforcement varies by port, Millard-Lowe said, with some dealers charging a percentage of a piece's "perceived value" and others charging based on the ticket price, with no consistent policy guiding the decision.
"Tariffs are a nightmare," he said.
Until the rules settle, he has started buying more often at auctions on the East Coast and in the Midwest, and stockpiling French purchases overseas rather than risk shipping them through customs, a workaround that has driven up his overhead.
Millard-Lowe opened his storefront in Ghent because, by his account, the neighborhood has long carried a reputation as an antiques destination, even as the number of dealers there has dwindled.
That reputation hasn't always been a clean one, he said. In the 1970s and '80s, a network of local dealers passed off mass-produced Chinese export porcelain as genuine 19th century pieces, capitalizing on buyers who wanted their homes to look like the Governor's Palace in Williamsburg. He said he built his business in direct opposition to that legacy.
"I guarantee everything that I sell is what I say it is," he said. "In the reputational world, we're just one step above used car salesmen, in my opinion. That's the reason why I guarantee everything I sell."
Style, social media and survival
Millard-Lowe's eye for detail extends well beyond the furniture. At 6 feet 8 inches, he often needs his clothing custom-altered, work he relies on Angela, a tailor at Albano Cleaners in Norfolk, to handle. He estimates he owns between 150 and 160 pairs of shoes, a habit he traces to growing up with little money.
"I grew up as a poor kid," he said. "So I was like, when I get old, I'm gonna buy whatever I want."
That same sense of personal style has become central to his business survival, playing out daily across TikTok, Instagram and Facebook.
On camera, Millard-Lowe alternates between showman and storyteller. Some videos show him standing beside a piece he's showcasing, walking viewers through its history and price. Others catch him slouched in a chair, legs crossed, talking through the details of a single piece the way a friend might.
He'll often break from the furniture entirely to detail his outfit of the day, naming the brands of his shirt, pants, shoes and jewelry. Sometimes his videos have guests, like a baby or his sick puppy, and Millard-Lowe keeps right on selling, smiling and laughing through it, inventory in one hand and leaning over petting the dog with the other, not missing a beat in conversation.
"I have a friend of mine in Charlottesville," Millard-Lowe said. "He was like, yeah, this is doing really well for me... I've had an Instagram presence for a while, but now, for the past about two years, we have been posting every day, or we try to, and it's good for business. I'm here as a business person trying to make a living, and so when business changes, you change with it, or you just die."
The exposure has translated directly into business. Millard-Lowe said visitors to Hampton Roads have started scheduling stops at his shop as part of their vacation plans after seeing his videos online. Others never make it to Norfolk at all, instead reaching out through his social media accounts to ask about specific pieces and buying them online.
The response depends heavily on the platform, he said. Younger viewers tend to find him on TikTok, middle-aged followers on Instagram, and an older crowd on Facebook, where the comments can turn personal. He recalled one message simply telling him to cut his hair.
Alongside his Ghent storefront, Millard-Lowe owns two other local businesses, The Gilded Shoestring, an upscale antique consignment showroom in the same building as his main store and Hunt and Gather, down the block, a more affordable shop full of antiques. His next move is geographic.
"My next thing is I want to have a shop in Charlottesville, but I'm waiting on a space to open up," he said.
He's also weighing a more experimental step with a friend who has proposed running Instagram live sales together, an idea Millard-Lowe is open to but hasn't fully committed to.
"I'm like, okay, we'll try that and see how that goes," he said.
