By Judy Carmack Bross
Doug Van Tress with a painting by a Thai artist in the background
When first introduced to Doug Van Tress by a mutual friend, I was mesmerized meeting someone whose 2026 would find him equally and happily in Chiang Mai, Thailand and Chicago.
The Golden Triangle’s new Chiang Mai gallery is built around an outdoor courtyard.
“Ours is not a normal antiques story,” Van Tress, co-founder of the Golden Triangle, Chicago’s preeminent shop for Asian antiques and textiles as well as contemporary décor, told us recently in his 10,000-square-foot showroom in West Town.
The Chang Mai gallery is a mixture of Chinese, Indian and Thai antiques and architectural elements.
“People might expect an antiques dealer to start with a love of antiques and then build a business. My business partner, Chauwarin Tuntisak, is our design head. He has an uncanny ability to put disparate things together stylishly and coherently.
“We began without any knowledge or appreciation of antiques. We started by selling handicrafts from one creative village outside Chiang Mai. Everything was new — and quite charming. The first ‘antique’ I sold was a table that I found with the intention of using it for display. We bought several of these strangely European antiques that came over from Burma. They were known as ‘British Colonial’ and mostly dated to the 19th century.”
Van Tress at work in Chiang Mai
At Chaing Mai Gallery
Van Tress noted his Chicago customers scooped them up and asked for more.
“It was off to the races,” he said. “In the beginning it was all about sales and, of course, visual attraction. I liked these pieces. Then I learned the history and liked them even more.”
The Chiang Mai gallery was inspired by a painting by Giorgio di Chirico -and Singapore shop houses
The romance of Thailand is crucial to Van Tress’s story, who first visited Chiang Mai in 1986.
“On the same trip I’d been to Tokyo, Hong Kong and Bangkok, and we only got to Chiang Mai at the end,” he recalled. “It felt like home. The cozy streets, the slower pace of life and especially the rice fields separated by narrow foot paths.
“I remember taking a lot of pictures of the rice paddies and banana trees in small grove and a certain tiny temple set far back from the road. The gentleness of the place and the human scale felt like something out of my own childhood in suburban Michigan, with tree lines and fields and small streams drawing me away from our modern house. My second home: I felt that instantly in Chiang Mai.”
But in a way, “yellow bookcases” started it all. Many of us remember a wall lined with National Geographic magazines which a relative couldn’t part with that then launched a love of world travel in the next generation.
Van Tress credits his two grandfathers for sharing their yellow bookcase, which eventually took him to Asia.
“I would go to my grandfathers’ basements and remember seeing a foldout photo in one of the National Geographics of a farmer plowing in front of a ruined Buddhist Temple. I remember thinking: ‘Why isn’t that man paying attention to that amazing place’?
“I grew up in Flint, Michigan where my father was a schoolteacher. He didn’t want us to watch TV, so his strategy was to have the worst TV in the neighborhood. I spent a lot of time at the library nearby, reading books about old buildings, British dreadnought battleships and other exotic things. I soon knew that I wanted to go to a college with an established foreign studies program, and Kalamazoo College provided that.”
Van Tress has the engaging qualities of a true people person including encouraging others to do what he did — open a store.
“If you have at all considered it, don’t just go electronic, go analog,” he said. “You will meet the coolest people in your city, community leaders, which is so much better than just living in the world of Instagram and numbers.
“Find ways to make it happen. Be that one out of 10 people. You can often re-negotiate a lower rent and find places that the owner wants to rent out. But there is no cheat code to this. You have to create a robust plan for survival and don’t waste money.”
Here is more of what we asked and Van Tress answered:
CCM: Tell us about what we can find in your store.
DVT: We like to say we are East, West, ancient and modern. That’s a lot of territory. We began in Asia and learned Southeast Asian, including colonial, first and then when China opened fully in the 1990s, we started shipping container after container from Hong Kong. In 2004, we started going to Hungary and discovered Art Deco furniture that had miraculously survived World War II and postwar communism. Nobody knew about these pieces because they’d been stuck behind the Iron Curtain. When that curtain lifted, most were snatched up by the French and became “French” on the road from Budapest to Paris. But many found their way to Chicago!
By 2007, we were buying in France, too and now India. We look for innate quality of materials first, pleasing designs and exciting contrast. No store in Chicago has ancient Indian doors, vintage French club chairs and polished walnut sideboards from Hungary all in the same room. We have an age range of 1800 BC to 2025 AD. Making sense of extreme contrast and diversity is our strength.
CCM; You talk about how grateful you are to all the people around the globe that you have worked with and are thankful for — please tell us more.
DVT: There are people that you learn from, people that feed your head. These are the people you buy from, mostly. And there are the people who feed your stomach, like my partner’s mother and sisters. Some gave us knowledge, some gave us direct support in our early days, connecting us to possible sources, loaning us money, letting us stay free. They helped us a lot.
I am very grateful to my partner’s brother Veerachai Tuntisak. He has developed our supplier network in India and maintained and extended our contacts in China, especially in the north. He joined our company in 1995 and has become the best antiques buyer in Asia. He manages our sprawling Chiang Mai store. He is a partner in that operation and a close personal friend.
In recent years, it’s been the suppliers in India and customers in China that have been a delight to work with. Working in China was a revelation — the speed and efficiency of construction is something we could learn from. “China speed” is a real thing. They bought from us like crazy, and we gave them some of our best work.
Visitors to the Chang Mai gallery
I was in Wuhan, China at New Year’s in 2020, doing “research” in competitor’s night clubs. We stopped at a roadside grill at 2 a.m., and a PLA soldier bought me drinks and we all toasted. So much fun, much of it crazy.
CCM: Many of the people who were your suppliers are, due to COVID, working for you. Tell us about the talented people on your staff.
DVT: Normally, we’re quite content to buy new things, like wall carvings and some furniture from trusted suppliers. It’s easier –place an order, come back in three months, only pay if it’s right. COVID stopped that. Workshops closed and never reopened. Tastes changed, the world changed. Some workers came to us in Chiang Mai looking for work. Some of them were highly skilled and extraordinarily talented, so we said yes.
This is just getting started, but we realize that if these ancient crafts are going to survive the next 10 years, we, and others like us, have to hire the artisans now. Some have already drifted off to easier work, but some want to carve wood. It’s interesting that there are basically two types of workers coming to us: “carpenters” who carve wood and “painters” who prefer doing finishes, including gold leaf. If you find someone who is both a painter and a carpenter, you have a unicorn. We have a few unicorns in Chiang Mai.
Guests celebrate at the Chiang Mai complex
CCM: You have said that Chicago has more Asian art for sale than almost anywhere else. Tell us more.
DVT: Haha, I’m going to take substantial credit for this. Before Golden Triangle, most Asian furniture or art in Chicago was from the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia. Hong Kong, Taiwan, some Japanese, too. It tended to be fine and over-fancy. While some Americans knew about the plainer and older designs, Ming furniture, tribal basketry, colonial furniture, like most Asian wares, were glossy and ornate.
We changed that in Chicago. Our pieces were more natural, often quite simple and easy to mix into contemporary interiors. We partly intuited the desirability of this style, but we were also taught by our customers. Some quite prominent Gold Coast ladies and designers, like Bruce Gregga, adopted us and tutored us. Business boomed and of course that draws competition. Primitive opened in the late 1990s as did Pagodared, 10 years after us. And then a host of others, that all subsequently closed. So now there are three large dealers in Chicago with extensive Asian collections. Not true in New York, L.A. or Houston. Just here.
CCM: You work in China and sell many treasures from there in Thailand. Tell us about your work in Asia.
DVT: We opened a warehouse in Chiang Mai in the mid-1990s and eventually bought land and erected some rather primitive structures with corrugated roofs. This was to support our shipments to Chicago. Then we started doing more restoration work. Eventually, we upgraded the buildings and opened a gallery complex in 2019, all aimed at the local market, with a restaurant in 2023. Many of our best customers are now Thai or Chinese.
We’ve sold a lot of Chinese furniture to Chinese collectors living part-time in Thailand. So we’ve literally sold Qing to the Changs. We also worked several years in China for a huge bar and restaurant developer. That was a wild ride. They had bars opening every week, and we had a role in many of them, upgrading their interiors. This was the cheerful, exuberant China of the pre-COVID era. We loved it. Lately our work has been more in Thailand, again in hospitality: spas, restaurants, museums, hotels, stores and often large architectural pieces, like building facades.
Doug Van Tress in Chiang Mai
CCM: Have you had treasures that you particularly loved and considered not wanting to sell?
DVT: Yes. Certain Chinese signs, furniture, weird rocks and pieces of wood, a painting or two. Mostly not because of inherent value but some quality that appeals to me. “Sublime decay” is my favorite. I like the unique patina and wear that accrues only to pieces made from high-quality materials.
The problem is that the pieces that appeal most to me appeal most to others, too. I bought a trio of life-size wooden Theravada angels, 200 years old, with an almost melted appearance, over 10 years ago and hoped nobody would see their full merit. But a hedge-fund guru bought them for $85,000. He didn’t know what he was looking at, but he intuited that they were rare and fabulous, and of course he was right. I also remember a weathered stump that looked exactly like the Paramount movie mountain that I sold for $1,000. It had meaning for me — a kind of heaven in miniature. I want that thing back, but it’s in L.A.
CCM: What are the biggest challenges of your job, and what gives you the most pleasure?
DVT: The biggest challenge is all the boring stuff that people think they understand: paying bills, keeping expenditures and revenues in balance. Marketing. Taking care of minor crises. This is most of my work.
The most pleasure is making art out of strange old things that are not inherently art. Or not yet. Not selling already perfect pieces, but reinventing something and showing it as art. It’s also fun to create esoteric vignettes with ancient furniture and artifacts.
At Chiang Mai
CCM: What recommendations do you have for people who want to make a purchase they will love for many years? What are questions you should ask of a seller?
DVT: It sounds very flippant to say buy what you like, but it’s good advice. If you actually want to keep something forever, your first reaction is quite reliable. Then confirm it with a pause. Look around at other things. Wait a day. Look at it again from a different angle and try to determine what you are responding to. Sometimes we’re responding to a mirage.
Of course, practical needs have to be considered as well. A dining table has to be fit for purpose, but if you have a powerful attraction to a particular table that has suitable dimensions, you’re probably on the right track.
Be wary of stories or labels. It’s fine to get the story later, but your first unfiltered reaction is the best. I look for robust construction, patina, good proportions. I let myself dream a bit. Avoid reading long descriptions of listening to whatever the dealer is saying, at least in the beginning. Long descriptions are literature, not art. If you want literature, I can recommend some 19th-century novels.
The Golden Triangle is located at 2035 West Grand in Chicago.
