Archeo Gallery

Archeo sits on Upper Duval, the quieter and more gallery-heavy end of the street, and it was founded by Wendy Asplundh after years of travel through Africa and Asia under the banner of ancient art for modern living. The room reflects that. There is African ceremonial art and hand-collected antique African jewelry, teak furniture from Java, and a deep bench of tribal Gabbeh rugs in hand-spun wool, knotted by Qashqai nomad weavers and carrying the tribal symbols that go with them. It is a browsing gallery rather than a walk-through-in-four-minutes gallery.

The two collections made specifically for Key West are the reason to pay attention. In 2019 Archeo partnered with Turquoise Mountain, the fair-trade nonprofit founded in 2006 by the then Prince of Wales, now King Charles III, to revive traditional craft in Afghanistan and elsewhere, and worked directly with a female design team in Kabul. The Topography rugs came out of that collaboration: hand-knotted in hand-spun wool with natural plant dyes, their designs taken from aerial views and nautical charts of the island chain from Big Pine Key down through Key West, so the shifting blues of the flats and channels become the pattern. The Pauline rugs come from a smaller and better story. Pauline Pfeiffer, Ernest Hemingway's second wife, bought their Whitehead Street house in 1931, and the tiles she chose for the upstairs bathroom carry a Deco bird and fish motif. Those tiles are the source of the rug. Both lines are woven by women in Afghanistan, and the point of the arrangement is employment as much as design.

Then there are the fossils, which are the thing nobody expects. These are fish preserved in the shale of an ancient lake bed in western Wyoming, more than 50 million years old, from an era when that part of the country was tropical in roughly the way Key West is now. Archeo has them cut and carved into wall pieces and free-standing works, framed or left with a raw edge, which means you can own a fish that predates the Florida Keys by tens of millions of years and hang it on a wall.

The gallery also carries fine jewelry worked in 22 and 20 karat gold with diamonds, tourmaline, moonstone, amethyst, topaz and Tahitian pearls, much of it hand-forged and hammered, alongside contemporary art, historic wood prints and encaustics. Archeo holds a Tripadvisor Travelers' Choice award. It is next door to the Alan S. Maltz Gallery, so if you are working Upper Duval you can do both in one stop.