On one of the hottest days of a very hot summer, fashion designer Cynthia Rowley stood in the un-air-conditioned front window of Christie’s Rockefeller Center headquarters. Surrounded by velvet and brocade cushions provided by ABC Bedding, as well as items from the August 9-10 House sale, Ms. Rowley drew and painted portraits of her fiance, author Bill Powers, for an hour last Wednesday.

What could compel a woman who has partied with Kate Moss and advised “America’s Next Top Model” to pace in a pink linen jumper inside a display case? In a word, marketing.

Ms. Rowley was the main attraction in a series of guest stars in Christie’s window this summer. While traffic didn’t exactly stop on 49th Street, passersby did crane their necks and pause along their slow, inexorable march to Fifth Avenue department stores. “Cynthia wanted a bit of theater,” a Christie’s spokeswoman, Kate Swan, explained. So did the auction house.

Christie’s monthly House sales traditionally offer the lowest priced items and are the lowest hyped events of the year. At these auctions, other people’s once-treasured interior decor can be purchased for less than a new divan at Design Within Reach or ABC Home.

Estimates for Austrian Successionist armchairs, porcelain figurines, and 18th-century wooden trunks, as well as still lifes and landscapes by history’s unsung painters, hover around $1,000. The auction house did an analysis of its buyers four years ago and found that 75% of items – from Chinese vases to 20th-century prints – sell for less than $5,000.

“We wanted to let people know that and to invite people in,” the director of communications at Christie’s, Andree Corroon, said. The “storefront” window displays are part of a new effort by Christie’s to reach out to the not necessarily wealthy (call them the middle class). To draw in the average earners and new shoppers, Christie’s has also created a “magalogue” containing sale previews, and inaugurated its First Open sale of work by emerging artists, targeted for younger buyers, this March.

The window displays for the House sales, Ms. Corroon said, are “a way to reach out to show that we are hip and fun, and that you can shop at Christie’s.” Since the beginning of this year, the windows have featured installations by “tastemakers” as part of a program called “A Few of My Favorite Things.” Designer David Rockwell and “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” interiors guru Thom Filicia have arranged rugs, candelabras, and settees in the window. The effort to attract less well-heeled buyers may be paying off: July’s House sale was the biggest ever, bringing in $3.66 million dollars for more than 1,000 items. (Previous sales this year earned between $2 million and $2.5 million.)

Sotheby’s has no such outreach program, or if it does, no one’s telling. “Details about how we monitor our buyers are proprietary,” a Sotheby’s spokesman, Matthew Weigman, said. The equivalent to Christie’s House sales are its Arcade sales of fine art, jewels, and decorative arts. The most recent, in July, pulled in $600,000. But two June sales of furniture and art combined for $5.6 million. Doyle New York also holds a sale of less price-point conscious property, which occurs August 25, at its End of Summer sale.

Tomorrow and Monday, students from the New York Academy of Art will be taking their turn inside Christie’s window display, sketching realistic scenes of simmering city life from 12:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. Ms. Rowley, who has re-created in the window the atmosphere of an authentic turn-of-the-century artist’s “hovel,” as she put it, said she was eager to showcase the struggle of the art students. She left empty bottles of wine and cracked loaves of peasant bread in the window to make it all a little “less precious,” she said. “I thought it was a little Dada to create an artist’s atelier in the window of the auction house.”

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Those whose longings for new and affordable art are made acute by the sight of idealistic, penny-pinching Academy artists sketching madly in Midtown may find some relief in Christie’s Insider Art Show, which opens tonight and runs through August 25. Organized by Jonathan Laib, it features works by 60 Christie’s employees. Some are artists by night, art handlers and department specialists by day.

Mr. Laib, an associate specialist in the contemporary department and former handler himself, has shown his paintings of riotous biomorphic blob collages at San Francisco’s Gregory Lind Gallery. Other staffers contribute rare one-offs. In addition to gallery-represented artists such as Jason Fox and Cary Leibowitz, the show includes works by the more game members of the communications department. (Sotheby’s holds its staff art show, which runs from August 15-26, in its London office.)

“I bought a work by one very talented artist last year,” Ms. Corroon said. “Not that I would ever sell it, but I am confident it will retain its value.” Mr. Laib has sold work from the show but says that the point is not market-driven: “The other benefits are perhaps more important – sharing ideas and getting feedback.” Only in the woozy days of August could an auction house stage a show with little to no commercial value.