Casa del Herrero Announces 1st Annual Montecito Estate Sale

Casa del Herrero has formally announced, by way of this news report, its first annual Estate Treasures Sale, to assist in funding the notable nonprofit organization. The event committee Chair Beth Esrey with Board of Trustees President Heather Biles and a team of volunteers are planning out all the details as we speak. Items for sale include timeless antiques, fine furniture, tableware, silverware, crystal, art, fine linens, rugs, collectable books, home décor, and more – curated just for the local Montecito community. Did I hear a huge retail therapy welcome?!

The team is taking donations 10 am – 2 pm every Friday from now through September at the Casa, and by appointment. All items will be checked for appropriateness for the sale, and if accepted, logged in and photographed for their social media updates and inventory. Pricing experts and curators are in the mix, and the goal is to advantageously price items to sell, and to not have any inventory at the end of the sale.

The estate sale is slated for Saturday, October 7, with a ticketed fundraiser Preview Party the week before. There will be a nominal ticket price for the actual estate sale.

To find out more, I sat down at the Casa with Esrey, Biles, and Operations Manager Rosie Rafferty on Wednesday. We first viewed some treasures in the garage area [see photo]. They shared that donations for the sale have overflowed the Casa garages. They are renting two storage units and will be getting a pod in the parking area to accommodate more incoming goodies. Notable donations are arriving, the first from Jami Voulgaris, owner of Rooms & Gardens in the Upper Village. Esrey said, “We reached out to Jami to help on the committee with pricing and she volunteered right away. She then shared that she had items in a warehouse to donate to us as well.”

As the Casa is too small to host the estate sale, the team is canvasing the local area to find a great location to have the event. Ideally, they’d like to keep it in Montecito. The Preview Party will be at the Casa, however, and a catalog will be available to view and purchase items for sale.

Although what looks at first blush to Montecitans as a nod to the Women’s Auxiliary of the Music Academy’s May Madness sale, which officially ended around 2016-17, we find that this is not the case. Biles explained, “We were doing some much-needed inventory and cleaning of our storage areas on the property and found many treasures that had been given to the Casa in the past ten years that are not part of the collection or inventory, and are taking up needed space. We decided these items would be ideal for an estate sale. In the Bay Area we call it a White Elephant Sale, and there is the Martha Stewart Estate Sale in the Hamptons. We were tossing it around and decided to do a community-wide estate sale. The Casa only has two events annually to raise funding, and now we can add this event as a resource for us. I’m new to the area (seven years) and Beth just moved here in January, so we had never heard of May Madness before. We actually found out about it when we contacted the Music Academy as a possible venue to hold the estate sale, and it’s exciting to know that their event was a big part of the community and missed!”

Esrey added, “It’s easy to say we want to reduce, reuse, and recycle, and what Casa is doing with our sale – and the Music Academy did with theirs – is put that in the hands of the community to now do and be a part of. It is important. It is not as sexy as a black-tie event, but it is really necessary. The Casa is a house, a neighborhood, a legacy, and a family. And it is so Montecito, and that is why people come here – because of community.”

For updates, stay tuned and check the website and Instagram!  

411: Website: MontecitoEstateSale.com
Email: casa@casadelherrero.com
Phone: (805) 565-5653
Instagram: @montecitoestatesale