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VINTAGE FINDS The Father and Son team settles in to a new location by SARAH NAGEM photography by EAMON QUEENEY
B
rian and Kiyomi Ownbey always had a thing for Midcentury design: the vibrant colors and garish themes of American Kitsch, and also the clean, calm lines of wooden Scandinavian furniture. But the couple say it was a “fluke” that they ended up opening Father and Son, a vintage store in downtown Raleigh where shoppers can get a Herman Miller chair for $3,800 or a Joan Baez record for five bucks. (Oh, and there are the old-school Christmas blow molds, plastic
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Santas and snowmen and choir singers that have really made a comeback). “I can’t say enough about how lucky we’ve been,” Brian Ownbey says. “This was a crapshoot.” The couple, both 52, didn’t set out to run a business. They met as undergrads at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, then headed to Ohio, where Brian Ownbey earned a master’s degree in creative writing from Bowling Green State University. He tried unsuccessfully to land a job as an English professor in the Triangle, and Kiyomi
Ownbey wasn’t sure what kind of work she wanted to pursue. So in the mid-1990s, they turned their vintage hobby into a business, renting space at an antiques store in City Market. There weren’t many places around to buy Mid-century goods, and customers couldn’t get enough of the couple’s flea-market finds, especially during their Friday-night events. “The line would be out the door,” Kiyomi Ownbey recalls. “It was like a feeding frenzy.” They opened their own store on
