The Estate of Julia Reed, Beloved Writer and Home Decor Shop Purveyor, Is Going Up for Auction

When great private collections come to auction, even those closest to the owner tend to discover unseen treasures stashed away for decades. However, for the estate of late journalist and author Julia Reed, to be offered online in Neal Auction’s Important Winter Estates Auction February 5–7, that general truism likely won’t bear out. “Julia didn’t just like to collect things and let them gather dust. She used them all in service to her incredible hospitality and generosity,” Keith Meacham, Reed’s dear friend and a fellow Mississippi native, tells AD PRO. Consistent with her munificence, all proceeds from the sale will benefit the Julia Evans Reed Charitable Trust, which partners with nonprofits to support those in need of housing, education, food, and more.

In 2018 the Southern duo founded Reed Smythe & Company, an online boutique featuring artisanal home goods largely inspired by Reed’s personal trove. “No one could lay a table like Julia Reed and put on it food that she had cooked and flowers that she had arranged. I don’t think she ever catered a thing in her life,” recalls Meacham. “For all of those who knew and loved her, everything in the auction has such sentimentality and meaning because we ate off those plates and laughed with her as we drank out of those glasses.”

Lot 6, an antique Chinese Chippendale mahogany camelback sofa, is a particularly nostalgic item for Meacham. “It was the center of so many of her entertaining spaces, from her apartment on 78th Street in New York all the way to her dining room on First Street in New Orleans,” she says. “It was such an eclectic decision to put a couch in the dining room, but it was perfect because at all of her big parties we would find [it in] a cozy little corner and have a glass of champagne on it.”

“Julia once described her style as ‘a bit of magpie,’” explains Meacham. “She lived in is this wonderful layered collection of things that were both very fine and very simple.” As evidenced by Lot 2, a Victorian taxidermy songbird parlor dome, and Lot 37, an English Regency needlework of a recumbent tiger, Reed has a particular fondness for nature and animals—even an abandoned bird’s nest she stumbled upon could have pride of place in one of her many abodes.

Reed discovered numerous antiques during her travels and was also an avid bidder at auctions. Lot 84, an English porcelain partial dinner service, for example, was purchased from the Mario Buatta sale at Stair Galleries just last year. “She was always thinking about how she could mix things and put them together on the table,” says Meacham. Other unique finds include Lot 7, a Regency mahogany octagonal wine cooler purchased from Niall Smith Antiques, which Reed would fill with magnolia leaves, oranges, and pomegranates on various occasions. “She had the best decorating sense of anyone I’ve ever known,” remembers Meacham. “It was instinctual.”