Bernard Karr began collecting antique furniture when he had to furnish his first apartment in Manhattan. Born in East Brooklyn, Mr. Karr worked as a junior high teacher for two years, but stumbled across a new passion when he began shopping for used furniture for his apartment on East 21st Street in the early 1960s.

“I rented an apartment and had to furnish it, and I do everything compulsively so I went to small second-hand furniture stores up and down Third Avenue,” Mr. Karr said. “I was always attracted to old things, rather than new things.”

Now, his own antique shop has become an old, established fixture — although not nearly as old as the 18thand early 19th-century English furniture Mr. Karr specializes in. Tomorrow, he will celebrate the 40th anniversary of Hyde Park Antiques, the store that he owns with his wife, Barbara. The party will be held at the store at Broadway and 13th Street, with 275 invitations extended to friends and colleagues. Interior designers Ellie Cullman, Charlotte Moss, and Mario Buatta will serve as hosts. Next week Rizzoli will publish “Classic English Design & Antiques: Period Styles and Furniture From the Hyde Park Antiques Collection,” which celebrates the anniversary. The lavishly illustrated book, with a foreword by Mr. Buatta, is worthy of a Chippendale coffee table.

The original inventory of the store, which was first located on Third Avenue, between 26th and 27th streets, was overflow from what Mr. Karr had bought for his apartment. He worked as a generalist furniture buyer, simply purchasing used furniture that appealed to him. In his fifth year of business, however, Mr. Karr started focusing on English furniture made between 1685 and 1825. “I like the clean, understated lines, and the soft finish,” he said. “I don’t like glitzy, flashy things.”

The same goes for Mr. Karr’s own apartment on the Upper East Side. Every piece of furniture in it is from the period of William and Mary — the late 17th century through the first years of the 18th century — through the Regency period of the 1820s. “The Regency period was a fantastic period in English decorative art,” Mr. Karr said. “It was when Britain owned 25% of the land mass — it was a time of tremendous wealth.” Despite that, English furniture remained very practical, which Mr. Karr said he appreciates. “There’s so much logic to English furniture,” Mr. Karr said. “English cabinet-makers were very consistent in the 18th century. These things were made to be used.” One of his favorite English pieces, a rare walnut chest from the early George II period of the first half of the 18th century stands in his bedroom.

Mr. Karr’s favorite piece of all his acquisitions over the past decades is not English, however. It is a large walnut and gilt Irish mirror made in Dublin around 1750, most likely made by John Booker. (“He was the great mirror maker,” Mr. Karr said, adding that it is impossible to know the exact date or be certain about the mirror’s maker.) The mirror boasts a hand-beveled plate and two Corinthian capital columns. At the top is a relief of woman’s head — a typical Irish feature during that period — with vines branching out from either side. Mr. Karr bought it at an auction about 20 years ago and it now hangs in the apartment’s front entryway.

Mr. Karr’s has other collecting passions, too. He owns three late-19th-century paintings by Atkinson Grimshaw, including two that depict a house outside Leeds in England. In the dining room hangs a set of four small 19th-century paintings by Galien LaLoue and an oil painting of a canal in the north of France by the Dutch painter Fritz Thaulou. An Eduoard Cortez painting of a Paris night scene hangs on the opposite wall.