Like the classic joke starts, a film buff and a math nerd walk into an auction hall…

Ryan studied film and philosophy. Liza studied mathematics. Between the two of us, we had pretty much zero plans to become antique dealers and auctioneers.

Ryan spent a decade in Boston and Somerville, where in 2016 he opened Memory Hole Vintage inside the historic Somerville Journal Building — a proper storefront, a room full of things that had somewhere else to be before they found their way to him. When he wandered in one day, then-mayor Joe Curtatone described it as a “very Somerville” kind of store — and Somerville agreed, awarding it Best Neighborhood Shop – Union Square in Best of Boston 2019. Ryan ran the shop until 2020, when a planned move to New Hampshire — just before the world stopped — proved fortuitous.

When Ryan and Liza met a couple years down the road (on a dating app for vegans and vegetarians — thanks Veggly!), big things started to happen. With Liza’s book smarts and business savvy (and, if Ryan’s being honest, a sudden drive to impress her) Memory Hole Vintage grew faster in their first year together than it had in all the years before. And one rainy night on a beach in Cape Cod — our first beach trip as a married couple, improbably under a rainbow — we sketched out what it could become.

That conversation became Granite Union Auction Company.

Before we had an auction hall, we had a barn. Our property in Jaffrey, New Hampshire hosted a run of barn sales — real, seasonal, show-up-and-dig affairs — that gave early shape to what we were building. That barn now serves as warehouse space for our auction business, and Jaffrey remains our home base.

In late 2021, Ryan started running auctions on Instagram Live — scrappy, real-time, building an audience lot by lot. Frustrated by Instagram’s limitations and looking for more control over the auction experience, we decided to move off that platform and build one of our own. Together we’ve been developing custom auction infrastructure, purpose-built for how we actually work: live events, online catalogues, discovery formats, and everything in between.

Our Franklin venue is the center of it all. A 1917 brick building with original stained glass windows, it served as the Christian Church of Franklin before becoming home to Meridian Lodge No. 60 of the Free and Accepted Masons. We hold our antique auctions in the upper hall — a proper lodge room, soaring ceilings, handsome millwork, the kind of space that makes a good piece of furniture look even better. Downstairs, the lower level hosts our Discovery Auctions in a function room that feels like a midcentury dance hall forgot to close.