What began as a shared enthusiasm for design and collecting among three friends has matured into a small-business fixture in Tucson’s Lost Barrio. Gather a Vintage Market occupies an unassuming brick building at 300 S. Park Ave., operating as part antique shop and part interior-design showroom. For four days each month the co-owners clear the room and rebuild it into a carefully staged market—an event-style experience that encourages customers to hunt for one-of-a-kind pieces and to linger among thoughtfully arranged displays.
The enterprise is run by Simon Carson, who oversees the creative direction; Lorri Boffo, who manages the back-of-house operations; and Timothy Reynolds, who handles checkout and customer transactions. The three purchased the business from a previous owner, a personal friend, about six years ago and have continued to refine the market’s identity since then. Their approach blends retail sensibilities with an exhibitional eye: every market weekend is presented as a new chance for visitors to discover furniture, decor and antiques that carry histories beyond their current display.
Shoppers inspect floral arrangements and vintage furnishings at Gather a Vintage Market in Tucson during the monthly treasure-hunt event.
Carson describes his role simply as doing "the creative side of it," taking responsibility for the visual presentation and overall design of each market installment. He said Boffo handles much of the administrative and staffing work—the bills, payroll and daily operational details—while Reynolds focuses on the point-of-sale functions. The division of labor is practical and direct, but it is their shared taste and commitment to the vintage aesthetic that unites the business. That commonality is visible in the way the owners select and combine items to create scenes that feel both collected and intentional.
The monthly market is not only a retail operation but a labor-intensive production. Though the shop is open to shoppers for only a few days each month, Carson says turning the space into the show-ready collection takes full-time effort. He and his partners curate themed displays and room vignettes—each arrangement designed to elicit surprise and delight from visitors who expect the market to be more than a storefront. "People expect it to be an event," Carson said. "They want to be wowed; they want it over the top; they want to treasure hunt."
That intentional theatricality extends to the inventory. Gather a Vintage Market houses vintage furniture, home accents, artwork and a rotating selection of antique finds. Paintings, prints and photographs appear alongside tables, lamps and floral arrangements, each selected and placed to suggest how items might function together in a lived home. The market’s rotating nature means that regulars encounter different collections at each event, an element that Carson said keeps customers returning month after month.
A selection of framed paintings and prints on display at Gather a Vintage Market, highlighting the variety of vintage artwork available to buyers.
The three co-owners bring varied backgrounds to the shop’s merchandising. Carson mentioned a long career in fashion that involved traveling internationally to buy pieces and to design for brands; that experience, he said, naturally extended into a passion for home decor. Boffo has been a consistent buyer herself, and antiquing began as a hobby shared among friends. Those histories inform decisions about what to include in the market and how to present it. Carson has spoken about the draw of objects that carry a past: each piece, in his view, arrives with a story—whether it has traveled across an ocean, been used in a family home for decades, or been repurposed by a previous owner.
Shoppers at the Gather a Vintage Market often arrive with the same purpose: to find an item they don’t already own, or to find inspiration for how to use secondhand furnishings and accessories in contemporary interiors. The market’s curated, roomlike setups offer a shortcut for buyers who do not want to assemble antiques and vintage pieces on their own from disparate sources. Instead of visiting multiple stores or sorting through online listings, customers can move through the staged spaces and imagine how pieces might fit together in their own homes. The result is a shopping experience that balances the thrill of discovery with the practicality of visual guidance.
Over the years the market has cultivated a following among Tucson collectors and decorators who treat each monthly opening as a new opportunity to expand a home’s collection. The rotating nature of the displays ensures that the space remains fresh: what is available one month will not necessarily be there the next, and that scarcity reinforces the feeling of a treasure hunt. The co-owners’ roles—Carson’s creative direction, Boffo’s operational stewardship and Reynolds’s handling of sales—work in concert to sustain an enterprise that is small in footprint but ambitious in presentation. Gather a Vintage Market remains, by design, a place where the past is gathered and arranged so that shoppers can take a fragment of it home.
The next Gather a Vintage Market runs July 9-12 with hours of 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Thursday-Saturday and 10 a.m.-3 p.m. Sunday. For the first time, it will feature a vintage clothing vendor in addition to the curated furniture, art and home accents. Details confirmed via the business's Instagram and This is Tucson coverage.
Gather was originally founded by Simone and Tray Gers; according to the market's own "Our Story" the pair launched the first four-day Gather market in January 2013 after converting a former lumberyard known as the Old Arizona Sash and Door Warehouse into the venue.
The market typically features about 16 rotating vendors who collaborate to stage the monthly themed vignettes, per the business's vendor information.
Local event listings and This Is Tucson event notices list admission as free and note that visitors rely on nearby on-street parking around the Lost Barrio location.
The business publishes a contact phone number (520-878-7215) and an email for inquiries, and its website states it uses Authorize.Net for secure credit-card payments.