Jean-Pierre Antiques

The window at 2601 P Street changes often enough that people who walk this block regularly make a habit of checking it. Jean-Pierre Sarfati designs his displays with the same eye he brings to the interior, and the effect is a sustained visual argument that antiques are not relics waiting to be catalogued but objects that remain alive when placed with intention. The shop sits on the western edge of Georgetown’s P Street corridor, where the street begins its transition from commercial to residential and the buildings hold some of the neighborhood’s oldest rowhouse architecture.

Sarfati was born in Morocco, grew up in France, and has lived in Washington for 50 years. Before he became an antiques dealer, he worked as a hairstylist, with clients that included Donna Karan and Bianca Jagger. That background is not a digression in his story. The skill that hairdressing requires, reading a person and understanding what will work for them, is the same skill that drives the way Sarfati curates and presents his inventory. He is not a passive merchant. He buys with strong opinions and sells with them.

The inventory centers on Italian painted furniture from the 18th century, Biedermeier pieces from the early 19th century, and 20th-century Murano glass lighting. These are categories that require genuine expertise to buy well, and Sarfati has spent decades building the eye and the sourcing relationships that make the selection at 2601 P Street different from what you find at a general antiques market. Custom clocks built from antique metal components are another signature. The handwork in these objects reflects his instinct for giving old material a second use that the original maker never imagined.

His signature color is Hermes orange, and he applies it without hesitation to pieces that warrant it. A 1940s club chair upholstered in Hermes orange fabric or a 19th-century French chaise recovered in faux leather of the same shade reads as a provocation only if you believe that antiques should be preserved unchanged. Sarfati takes a different view: that a well-made piece can absorb a contemporary intervention and become more interesting for it, not less. The collectors who come to him regularly agree, and the shop has been in Georgetown since the early 2000s on the strength of that agreement.

The shop is open Monday through Saturday from 10 in the morning to 5 in the afternoon. Sundays are available by appointment. For a first visit, arriving on a weekday gives you Sarfati to yourself, which is how the shop works best. He knows his inventory in detail, down to the provenance of individual pieces, and a conversation with him about what is on the floor will tell you more about what you are looking at than any tag or catalogue entry could. Street parking on P Street near 26th is variable. The Georgetown Circulator runs on Wisconsin Avenue a short walk east. For serious collectors of European decorative arts or for anyone who wants to find something genuinely unusual in a city where most antiques shops sell to the same taste, the address is worth remembering.