Fine Furniture & Decorative Arts

Karen has enjoyed a 45-year career in decorative arts, fueled by her interest in the history of the interior and its furnishings. She joined Heritage Auctions in 2007, following Heritage Auction’s first decorative arts auction in 2004. She oversees the broad-ranging auction category of Furniture and Decorative Arts, which covers ceramics, glass, woodwork, and metalwork in addition to furniture. Karen helped build the first standalone biannual auction of Fine Silver & Objects of Vertu in 2008 and has directed the auction series since 2012.

Karen’s fascination with the decorative arts started in her earliest years, spending weekends at Estate Sales in her hometown of Grosse Pointe, Michigan, and developed as an undergraduate Interior Design student at Michigan State University, where she was given the keys to the storage below the Spartan’s football stadium with instruction to catalog their extensive holdings of donated decorative arts from the 19-20th centuries. Her interests led to an internship at the Victoria & Albert Museum’s Department of Furniture & Woodwork, where the curatorial staff directed her research and orchestrated weekend trips to magnificent country houses. They guided her to a Master’s Degree in Decorative Arts History from Parsons’s School of Design and the New School for Social Research through the Cooper Hewitt Museum.  Her career began in the curatorial departments of distinguished collections, including the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, where she oversaw the reinstallation of the decorative arts collections and period rooms as well as establishing the collecting direction of the Norwest Modernism Collection.

Following the birth of her first child, Karen changed course and directed furniture and decorative arts galleries in Birmingham, MI, Chicago, and Atlanta.  An adventuresome spirit led her and her family to Cyprus, where she operated a bed and breakfast while studying the ancient ruins, particularly the floor mosaics of the UNESCO site in Paphos.  Returning to the US in 2003 she developed a decorative arts history curriculum and taught graduate and undergraduate courses for institutions, including Georgia State University and Dallas College, before joining Heritage Auctions full-time in 2007.