Antique value
Old is not valuable. Brown furniture, Victorian china and silver plate sell for a fraction of a generation ago. Marks, maker and a specialist sale are what move the number.
Sold prices move, so this page does not quote them. Use the completed listings below.
Example estimate
Polaroid SX-70 Land Camera
$190
Usually sells for $120 – $320
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The short version
| What collapsed | Brown furniture, formal china and silver-plated serving pieces. Smaller homes stopped wanting them. |
|---|---|
| What still sells | A readable maker's mark, documented provenance, or twentieth-century design people still collect. |
| Patina | An untouched surface is preferred. Stripping and re-polishing is the expensive, irreversible mistake. |
| Where it sells | A marked piece at a local marketplace and the same piece at a specialist sale are different prices. |
Check recent sold prices for this category
Check these before you trust a price
- Photograph marks underneath, on the back, or inside a drawer before you refinish anything.
- Look for hand-cut dovetails and irregular saw marks. Uniform machine cuts mean a later copy.
- Do not use an old insurance figure as the sale price. That number is a replacement cost.
What actually moves the price
- Maker and marks
- A documented maker or a readable mark can multiply value. Unmarked pieces sell on style and quality alone.
- Age and authenticity
- Period pieces are worth far more than later reproductions. Tool marks, wear patterns and construction tell the difference.
- Condition and originality
- Original finish, hardware and parts matter. Heavy restoration or replaced parts lowers value.
- Current taste
- Demand changes. Brown furniture and formal china have fallen; mid-century and folk art have risen.
Photos that change the estimate
A antique priced from a pretty front shot is a guess. These are the shots that identify it.
- Take one full shot, then close-ups of marks, labels, signatures and joins.
- Photograph the underside or back, where makers' marks usually are.
- Use daylight. Yellow indoor light hides wood tone and patina.
- Include something for scale, or type the measurements in the details box.
Age stopped being the price
The antiques market has been through a long and well-documented correction, and pretending otherwise is the fastest way to be disappointed. Brown furniture, Victorian china, silver-plated serving pieces and the general contents of a mid-century household sell today for a fraction of what they fetched a generation ago, because the houses that displayed them have been replaced by smaller homes with different tastes. Age alone has almost no purchasing power.
What has held up is design, maker and rarity. Signed pieces by recognised makers, items with documented provenance, anything genuinely scarce, and twentieth-century design with a current following all continue to sell well. The pattern is consistent: the market pays for the specific, and ignores the merely old.
Condition in antiques is judged against expectation rather than against perfection. A two-hundred-year-old object is allowed honest wear, and buyers in this field often prefer an untouched surface with its original patina to something that has been cleaned up. Restoration must be disclosed, and over-restoration reliably reduces the price.
Category also decides the venue, which decides the price. A regional saleroom, a specialist auction and a general marketplace will return three different numbers for the same object, and the gap is widest for the items that need an expert audience to be recognised at all. For anything with a maker's mark, where you sell it matters as much as what it is.
Marks, construction and patina
- Find the marks before anything else
- Maker's marks, hallmarks, factory stamps and signatures sit underneath, on the back, or inside a drawer. A marked piece and an unmarked piece of apparently identical quality are separated by an order of magnitude in price.
- Construction dates the object
- Hand-cut dovetails, irregular saw marks, shrinkage across the grain and oxidised secondary timbers indicate age in furniture. Uniform machine cuts and modern screws indicate a later copy, however convincing the surface looks.
- Patina is not dirt
- The soft depth an old surface develops cannot be recreated and should not be polished off. Buyers in this market discount refinished pieces heavily, which is the reverse of how most sellers assume it works.
- Repairs and replacements
- Replaced handles, re-glued joints, married pieces assembled from two objects and later carving are all detectable and all material. They do not make an item unsellable, but undisclosed they turn a sale into a dispute.
Refinishing and the insurance-value trap
These are the mistakes that show up on this kind of item, not generic selling advice.
- Refinishing before selling
- Stripping and re-polishing an old surface is the single most expensive mistake in this category, and it cannot be undone.
- Relying on an insurance valuation
- Insurance figures are replacement costs for buying something similar at retail. They are routinely several times what the object would actually sell for.
- Selling a signed piece locally
- The buyer who recognises the maker is not browsing a local marketplace. Items with marks belong at a specialist sale, where the audience knows what it is looking at.
- Assuming a set is worth the sum of its parts
- Large dining suites and full dinner services are harder to sell than single pieces, because few homes have room. Breaking them up often nets more.
When to bring in a professional
A free auction-house valuation is worth getting for anything marked, anything with documented history, and anything where you cannot tell whether it is period or a later copy. Reputable salerooms give estimates without obligation and will tell you honestly when something is not worth entering. For house clearances the sensible order is to have one specialist walk through first, pull the handful of items worth consigning, and only then decide what to do with the rest, because the usual mistake is selling the one good thing in with the furniture.
Common questions
Is an AI estimate the same as an appraisal?
No. A certified appraisal for insurance or estates needs an accredited appraiser who handles the piece. Use the estimate to decide whether a piece is worth that step.
How do I know if it is a reproduction?
Look for even machine cuts, Phillips screws, staples and uniform wear. Real age shows as uneven wear where hands and feet touch.
Where do antiques sell for the most?
Specialist auction houses for high-value pieces; eBay, Etsy and Facebook Marketplace for most items under a few hundred dollars.
Related value guides
Not this kind of item? Estimate anything from a photo, or open a related guide.