About Alchemy

Bates Eleanor Jaffe-Jones, Owner

 

Alchemy Antiques and Autos is a Kansas City based fine art and antiques restoration studio with a sister shop specializing in full service classic Mercedes Benz rebuilds and restoration.

Alchemy was born in 2008 in a New York City apartment full of neglected Schwinn bicycles hauled from the midwest and lovingly restored. Our love of restoration soon grew to include art and antiques. We graduated from two wheels to four in 2011 with the restoration of classic Mercedes-Benz automobiles.

Owner Bates E. Jaffe is a Design Historian specializing in the history of furniture design, with a dual focus on 18th Century British and Interwar Continental Modernism. She attended New York University and the University of St. Andrews before completing an M.A. in Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture at the Bard Graduate Center. After fifteen years in New York running Alchemy Antiques as well as holding positions at Christie's, Doyle, Heritage Auctions, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bates has settled in Kansas City running Alchemy out of the 1920s furniture shop and studio she is restoring with her husband.