The Numbers Don’t Lie
MEMBER SPOTLIGHT: Bon Vivant Antiques & Period Furnishings
How retired Navy captain Carl Ihli built Bon Vivant Antiques on fair prices, straight talk, and twenty-seven years of earned trust on Annapolis Street.
When Carl Ihli retired from the Navy after 25 years, he knew he needed something to do next, but what? His wife’s answer to the question was simple: “You need to do what’s in your heart.” What was in his heart, it turned out, was antiques. In July of 1999, Carl and his wife bought a 1927 Sears catalog house at 104 Annapolis Street. It had been a coffee shop, and the floors were rough, so they ground them down, sanded, polished, and painted. On August 15, 1999, Carl opened the doors to Bon Vivant Antiques and Period Furnishings. This August 15 marks twenty-seven years in business.
From the Navy to Annapolis Street
The house has a quiet second life above the shop. Upstairs, Carl’s wife runs her medical practice, her patients arriving through a back parking lot and a garden while his customers come in the front. Two businesses, one 1927 roof, and never the two shall meet. Bon Vivant deals in the fine things: high-end porcelain, crystal, and signed objects of art. Carl used to sell furniture and has let it go. “I’m too old,” he says with a laugh. What he has not let go of is the standard he built over a career in uniform. Honesty, he says, is the bedrock of the business, and after mtwenty-five years in the Navy, that is not a slogan.
Owner, Carl Ihli
The Numbers Don’t Lie
Ask Carl what sets him apart and he points to the computer on the counter. When someone brings in a piece to sell, he sits them down and they look up together what it has actually fetched in completed eBay auctions, a Google image search and an eBay search side by side. “The numbers don’t lie,” he says. If an item sells consistently for $100, he will offer 30 to 50 percent of that, cash, and the seller can walk out the door. Everything in the shop is already priced to those same completed listings, so even a first-time walk-in gets a fair number.
“It’s the business that keeps me alive.”
Sometimes he talks people out of selling to him at all. For anything under $100, he will suggest they try Facebook Marketplace or a local buyer first, though about half decline the trouble. It is not about the money, he says; it is about a seller leaving with a fair number and a good feeling, and then spreading the word. Word of mouth, he will tell you, still works as the best form of advertising.
Go online, or don’t survive
Bon Vivant’s turning point came around 2007, after the crash, when foot traffic and sales fell and Carl could not buy his way out with advertising funds he did not have. So he leaned into eBay, and it became his lifeline; COVID only sealed the lesson. He is candid that the tools cut both ways: because dealers everywhere price from the same running sales data, values on even fine pieces keep drifting down, which he says makes right now a buyer’s moment. In the last year or so he has also started consigning some of his stock to colleagues with their own online reach, splitting the proceeds, a small collaboration that is working. His advice to anyone dreaming of a shop is blunt.
“It’s fine to have a storefront, but if you do not have an online presence, you will not survive.”
The violin, and where he finds peace
People who know Carl only across the counter might not guess the rest. He is a 1968 Naval Academy graduate who came back to teach, serving as chairman of the Oceanography Department from 1991 to 1993. As a younger officer he trained in meteorology and oceanography in Monterey and joined a small Navy community of fewer than 500 specialists who cheerfully called themselves “weather guessers,” charting how sound moves through the ocean to track Soviet submarines.
He also played violin for more than fifty years, a serious amateur who subbed with the Annapolis Symphony and played quartets and weddings, until osteoarthritis in his hands ended it about five years ago. Music still steadies him. “When we’re really down and out, we can find great peace in the music that we like,” he says. His own prescription is a five-minute recording of an English a cappella group singing Billy Joel’s “Lullaby.”
Cheering from the front porch
Carl’s ties to the neighborhood run deeper than the storefront suggests. He once served as WABA’s vice president in charge of advertising, a year or so after he opened. These days he roots for the neighborhood from a comfortable distance. “I’m on my front porch with pom-poms,” he says, for everything WABA does. And after watching the street turn over for a quarter century, he has made peace with his own place on it. “I’m the antique building on the street now, which makes me laugh.”
Twenty-seven years in, the whole business plan is still the same: treat people fairly, tell them the truth, and let the numbers speak for themselves.
Find Bon Vivant Antiques & Period Furnishings
Carl Ihli, Owner
104 Annapolis Street, Annapolis, MD 21401 • Open noon–5, seven days a week (a quick call ahead is wise, as Carl is occasionally out for appointments)
