The auctioneer Colin Stair recalls the first time he visited Salander-O’Reilly Galleries’s grand East 71st Street townhouse. “I was struck by Mr. Salander’s incredibly good taste. It was easy to see why he had so many high-profile clients,” he said.

These days, nobody knows more about the furnishings of that limestone townhouse than Mr. Stair: He’s been chosen to administer the June 7 sale of the gallery’s Renaissance furniture collection, picture frames, and impressive English garden statuary.

The sale is among the first auctions of items associated with the Upper East Side gallery since its owner, Lawrence Salander, shut it down late last year after a string of highly publicized financial disputes with some of his clients. Millions of dollars in debt, Mr. Salander filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in November 2007.

Mr. Stair assigns an overall estimate of between $1 million and $2 million for the auction, one of a handful of such sales meant to liquidate the gallery’s assets. He’s holding the sale at Stair Galleries, his 25,000-square-foot auction house in the upstate town of Hudson.

The 310 lots include 90 architectural and garden ornaments Mr. Salander bought in 2004 at a Christie’s auction in England, largely from the collection of Michael Roberts of Kent. Mr. Stair said that Mr. Salander shipped the collection from England and stored it in his warehouse on 188th Street in upper Manhattan, where it remained until six weeks ago.

“Here’s a guy who apparently didn’t have a lot of money, and there he was spending $1 million on a garden collection. It strikes me as a very interesting way to go shopping,” Mr. Stair said.

Included in the garden collection are two Coade stone finials that have everyone from 18th-century art enthusiasts to upstate landscape architects expressing interest, he said. Coade stone is a form of pottery popular in late-18th- and early-19th-century England.

According to Mr. Stair, the urn-shaped finials, with snake-form handles, are attributed to Mark Henry Blanchard, who apprenticed with Eleanor Coade, the potter for whom the terra-cotta formula is named. He expects the urns to sell as a pair for between $6,000 and $10,000. Mr. Salander bought them for more than $68,000 from Christie’s four years ago.

Mr. Stair describes as “astonishingly beautiful” the Italian renaissance, two-piece walnut cabinet that he thinks can fetch anywhere between $10,000 and $15,000. Other lots include gilt wood frames used by Mr. Salander over the years to display works by celebrity clients.

Carey Maloney, the owner of M (Group), a Manhattan interior design firm, said he’s excited about the opportunity to bid on items he’s seen for many years in Mr. Salander’s lavishly appointed Upper East Side townhouse. “I frequented the place and had friends who showed their works there, so I guess I can say I’ve followed the inventory over the years,” Mr. Maloney said.

The auction is bound to attract some very specialized groups, he said. English garden statuary, most of which is extremely heavy and expensive to transport, is rarely available outside England. The fact that the bulk of this English collection is in New York is a testament to Mr. Salander’s spare-no-expense flair as a gallery owner, according to Mr. Maloney.

“You’re also going to see a lot of frame dealers and frame specialists at the Stair auction,” he said. “There are some incredible antiques at this sale — it’s going to be great for Colin’s business.”

But some auction-watchers are not pleased that these lots will be sold upstate. According to a report by Bloomberg, Mr. Salander’s father-in-law Donald S. Dowden asked a U.S. Bankruptcy Court to prevent the auction from going forward. As a 20% stakeholder in the lots, he argued that this sale was a “country auction in upstate New York” and should have been conducted “at a well established auction house in a major center with an international following.”

On Tuesday, a U.S. Bankruptcy Judge dismissed the argument, though this sale may yet be contested. According to Bloomberg, Mr. Dowden claims that his daughter was not properly and fully informed of the quantity and substance of the auction.

If the show does go on, it will not be an amateur affair. A 15-year veteran of Sotheby’s, Mr. Stair founded his own auction house seven years ago in Hudson, a town in Columbia County that’s increasingly becoming home to artists and writers from New York City. Part of the $9 million in sales the Stair Galleries posted last year came from the auction of Philadelphia mainliner John duPont’s decorative garden collection.

Mr. Stair said he keeps commissions “more reasonable” than the larger estate auction houses by using a business strategy he learned while at Sotheby’s during the late-1990s Internet boom: He forgoes printing exquisitely illustrated catalogs in favor of posting photographs online.

He said he was chosen to auction the townhouse furnishings by a finance committee involved with the gallery’s bankruptcy proceedings. The furniture and garden collection are among the first gallery items to hit the auction block because nobody is contesting their ownership, he said.

The U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York has ordered a June 15, 2008, deadline for claims of ownership on disputed items associated with the Salander-O’Reilly Gallery.

“There’s a strong consensus that [Mr. Salander] bought all of his furniture and it was all paid for. The paintings are a different story,” Mr. Stair said.