Utahn acquires treasure trove

It's hard to say if John Matson was a dealer or a hoarder. What do you call a man who owned 55,000 antiques, so many old chairs and buffets and tables and desks that he piled them as high as the ceilings, so much stuff piled on top of another, the legs of the chairs jumbled together with the legs of the tables, that it was impossible, eventually, to walk across the rooms of his gallery.

Matson is 89 now and resides in an assisted living facility in Liverpool, England. A couple of years ago, the things he had collected over 40 years were liquidated; then most of it — 40,000 pieces — was sold to Salt Lake antique dealer Scott Evans.

Evans has since moved the furniture to a warehouse on 600 South. He says it's the largest collection ever sold at one time, and he figures he now owns the biggest antique store in the United States. Euro Treasures, the name Evans gave to the collection, takes up 85,000 square feet in a warehouse that once stored tractors. There's so much stuff that the warehouse isn't big enough; nine additional 40-foot shipping containers sit out back waiting to be unloaded.

Nearly all of the furniture in the warehouse comes from England. One can imagine thatched cottages and drafty old estates, dukes sitting near sideboards having a spot of tea. There is a lot of Victorian this and Georgian that, most of it dark mahoganies and walnuts and oaks. There is an Elizabethan court cupboard from the late 1550s, a pub bench from 1620 and a hand-carved rosewood Regency secretary from 1840.

Evans recently sold the secretary for about $60,000 to a woman in Ogden. He's confident that there is enough wealth and enough interest in antiques in Utah that eventually — maybe it will take him 10 years — he'll sell all of the collection, mostly to people in state.

Right now, though, it's furniture as far as the eye can see. "From here to the back, we've done the Matson thing," says Evans, meaning that while some of the furniture has been placed in rows, a lot is still just buried behind and under everything else, with no access. "There's a million and a half dollars worth of stuff from here to the wall. It'll take us three years to get to it."

It cost about $7 million and took 18 months to buy, package and ship the stuff from Liverpool. Sixty thousand dollars in cardboard alone, most of it now sitting in the warehouse waiting to be reused. The antiques started arriving in Salt Lake City in June 2004; the last container was hoisted into the backyard of the warehouse in September 2005.