A Day In Round Top With Paige Hull

After more than two decades of treasure hunting here, The Vintage Round Top founder has officially made Round Top home. She shares the places she returns to, the find she’ll never forget, and the advice she’s picked up along the way.

There are people who come to Round Top for the show, and then there are people for whom Round Top slowly becomes part of the story of their lives.

Paige Hull falls firmly into the latter camp.

She has been coming to Round Top for more than two decades. For 15 of those years, she has also had a business here, building The Vintage Round Top alongside Paige Hull Designs. And after years of making the trip from Austin, Hull recently made perhaps her biggest Round Top commitment yet.

She moved here. “Just moved to RT from Austin last week!” she told Round Top Finds.

Ask Hull to describe the place that has kept pulling her back for more than 20 years and she needs only three words:

“Magical treasure trove.”

It’s an apt description from someone whose relationship with Round Top has been built, quite literally, one treasure at a time.

When booking your Round Top stay, Paige notes, some vendors open one to two weeks earlier than the official show, and there are year-round venues as well, so it can sometimes be worth coming early. Just know there will be substantially fewer vendors than during the official show. For a private shopping tour 

A Paige Hull day in Round Top begins the way many good Round Top days do. “Coffee!”

She isn’t particularly dogmatic about where. Round Top Coffee, Pie Haven and Mill Street all make the list.
The order, however, is considerably more specific: a large oat milk latte with one pump of vanilla. “My daughter turned me on to this concoction,” Hull says.

Then it’s time to shop, with after more than two decades here, narrowing down the list proves considerably harder.

“There’s so many that it’s hard to narrow it down!”
Around town, Hull points to Henkel Square, Roland Square, Round Top Shops and Cisco’s. During show season, the radius expands: Blue Hills, The Horseshoe, Marburger, The Compound, The Arbors, Market Hill, The Halles and Excess all make her list. 

It’s also a useful reminder for anyone attempting to understand Round Top for the first time: there isn’t really one Round Top. What we casually call “Round Top” stretches through town squares, permanent shops, tents, barns, fields and neighboring communities. One minute you’re walking through a beautifully merchandised venue; the next you’re pulling off the highway because you spotted something interesting from the road.

The places you planned to visit are only half the fun.

For all the attention paid to what you can buy in Round Top, two of Hull’s favorite hidden gems require very little shopping at all.

Festival Hill and the Round Top Library.

They’re fitting choices for someone who has watched Round Top evolve from an antiques destination into something that feels increasingly like its own little cultural world.

The shopping may be what first gets you here. But the old buildings, music, history, landscape and people are what begin to explain why so many keep coming back.

Eventually, of course, you have to eat.

Hull’s lunch pick is Country Sunshine. For a cocktail or happy hour, she heads to Il Cuculo or Prost. Dinner might mean Boon & Co., Lulu’s or Garden Company.

Consider it less a minute-by-minute itinerary and more a very good starting point for doing Round Top Paige’s way.

You can’t ask someone who has spent more than 20 years shopping Round Top about the place without asking about the find.

For Hull, it’s a pair of old doors.

She remembers finding doors from the Divine, Texas Cotton Gin through Hector the Collector at Big Red Barn. They eventually found a home in the kitchen of The Vintage Round Top’s Boho Cottage.

It’s the sort of find that makes perfect sense here.

Round Top has a way of convincing you to reconsider what an object can be. An old door doesn’t necessarily need another doorway. A workbench can become a kitchen island. A cabinet pulled from an old store can anchor an entirely new room.

The question becomes less What was this? and more What could this become?

Hull’s own shopping philosophy leaves room for exactly that kind of possibility.

“I’ve bought and stored pieces I wasn’t sure where to use at the time and ended up being so glad I had them.”

Which brings us to perhaps her simplest—and most useful—piece of Round Top advice:

“Buy it if you love it!”

Because anyone who has ever walked away from something at Round Top, thought about it for three hours, returned and discovered a SOLD tag hanging from it already knows the alternative.

Rooms change. Houses change. Pieces move around. But the things you genuinely respond to tend to find their place eventually.

As for what can still stop Hull after all these years?

Vintage fabric.

That’s what she’s always hunting.

Hull has another piece of advice that’s particularly useful for first-time visitors: don’t get too attached to the idea of one official opening day.

“Some vendors open one to two weeks earlier than the official show, so it can be worth coming early,” she says.

It’s one of Round Top’s quirks and one of the reasons planning a first trip can feel confusing.

“The show” isn’t a single show at all. It’s a collection of venues, fields, dealers and individual schedules stretching across miles of Texas countryside, with opening dates that vary.

Coming early can mean fewer crowds, more time to talk to dealers and a completely different pace from the height of show week.

It also leaves a little more room for the thing Round Top does particularly well:

the unexpected.

The People And The Magic

After more than two decades of coming here, Hull has certainly found plenty of things.

Doors. Fabric. Pieces for homes and projects. Objects she knew exactly what to do with and others she was willing to store until the answer presented itself.

But when asked to finish one sentence—The best thing about Round Top is…—she doesn’t mention the antiques.

“The people and the magic.”

Maybe that explains her story better than any list of favorite places could.

For more than 20 years, Hull kept coming back. She built a business here. She collected here. She became part of the community here.

And eventually, she stopped making the drive back to Austin.

She made Round Top home.

A DAY IN ROUND TOP WITH…

A Day in Round Top With… is a recurring Round Top Finds series asking the designers, dealers, collectors, creatives and characters who know Round Top well to show us the place through their eyes—where they shop, what they order, what they’re hunting for and the places they return to again and again.

Experience the show alongside Paige's private shopping tours. 
Website: The Vintage Round Top

Instagram: @TheVintageRoundTop
Website: The Vintage Round Top

· Round Top, Texas ·