Antique furniture has had a tough couple of decades. After reaching dizzying heights in the late 1990s, the market for high end antique furniture peaked out around the year 2002 according to the ACC Antique Furniture Index. Since then, the old furniture market has gone nowhere but down, down and then down some more.
At this point, prices for many high end pieces are off by as much as 50% to 80%. Low-end and mid-range furniture is doing even worse, if that’s possible. It can be difficult to give away some Victorian and Edwardian pieces these days.
I’m not going to delve into the many reasons why antique furniture has trended down for the past 15 plus years. Instead, I’m going to posit a simple, but radical idea: maybe 2020 is finally the year to buy antique furniture.
Now I’m going to restrict my analysis to the lower-to-mid range of the market here. I’m not talking about gilt-walnut French Louis XVI chairs or English George III mahogany breakfronts that (still) get auctioned at Christie’s and Sotheby’s for tens of thousands of dollars. Yes, those pieces might be good (or even great) buys at today’s depressed prices, but they are outside the scope of this article.
Instead I want to discuss the other end of the vintage furniture market – the old dressers and slightly banged up end tables that you might find at a thrift shop or antiques mall. These pieces have almost universally been neglected in today’s uncompromising trend towards ultra-modern interior decorating.
What has happened is that young people have largely been buying what is cheap and on-point, stylistically speaking. And nothing epitomizes this trend better than IKEA flat-pack furniture.
I feel compelled to use quotation marks around the word “furniture” in this context. In reality, these self-assembled, wood-like constructions hardly qualify as furniture. In order to keep price points low, IKEA furniture is made from the very cheapest materials – usually wood-chip pressboard or MDF with a thin wood (or plastic!) veneer applied overtop.
The result is a piece of furniture that looks alright as long as you don’t inspect it from any closer than the other side of the room. And, after a year or two of regular use, you can expect the veneer to start peeling off and the pressboard to sag. In short, the entire thing will begin to gradually melt back into the pile of wood dust and glue that it came from.
And then it will invariably end up sitting out at the street corner waiting for the trash collectors.
This is a problem. Many people, particularly younger people, are increasingly environmentally conscious. But flat-pack furniture flies in the face of this ethical obligation. It is everything that is wrong with our modern, consumption-oriented lifestyle. Do you really want to be the person that buys a piece of flat-pack “furniture”, only to throw it out after a few years when it ceases to be structurally sound or good looking?
Enter low-end antique furniture.
Vintage furniture has some major advantages over your average IKEA flat-pack furniture. First, it has green credentials. The stuff is generally at least 50 years old, and often 100 or even 150 years old. This is the ultimate reuse opportunity. Nobody is cutting down any virgin forests to put these pieces in your local thrift shop. No noxious industrial chemicals are being used to bind plantation-harvested wood-chips together here. Old furniture made a century ago from good, solid wood represents the pinnacle of sustainability.
And that leads to antique furniture’s next advantage. It lasts forever and looks good doing it. You don’t have to worry about your circa 1900 oak dining table falling apart because your drunk friend thought it would be funny to dance on top of it. Your 1930s Art Deco dresser is going to be just fine even if you slam the drawers shut every morning in a pre-coffee rage. Old furniture will survive serious amounts of abuse and last for centuries (provided you don’t try to kill it with fire).
You can also pick whatever look or style strikes your fancy. Anything from Victorian excess to Mid-Century minimalism is available in the marketplace. In fact, there is no reason why you can’t mix and match styles. A growing trend in interior decorating is eclecticism, combining pieces of wildly varying appearances in the same space. Even if most of your apartment, loft or townhouse is decorated in purely modern themes, there is no reason you can’t incorporate an antique statement piece for a truly stunning contrast.
But perhaps the best reason to choose antique furniture over pre-fab, flat-pack junk is the price. The antique furniture market has been hit so hard by the Great Recession that prices for some pieces are hardly any more expensive than their IKEA flat-pack equivalents. In other words, for the same price as a dumpy, self-assembled glue and particleboard nightmare, you might be able to afford a real piece of vintage furniture constructed from oak, cherry, walnut or even mahogany.
20th Century Vintage & Antique Furniture for Sale on eBay
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Don’t believe me?
Cruise on over to IKEA’s website and take a look. One of their dining tables will run you somewhere between $150 and $400. A living room entertainment stand goes for between $100 and $400. Even a simple end table will cost you $40 to $150. Of course, IKEA does sell even cheaper furniture, but it is the nastiest of the nasty – the kind of stuff more befitting dumpster divers than young bohemians.
In contrast, a quick perusal of eBay reveals a set of 4 matching solid walnut Mid-Century end tables for only $299. An antique quarter-sawn oak storage chest is available for $290. A sleek 1960s oak dresser is a measly $80. Any of these pieces would fit beautifully in a modern living space.
And if the thought of buying old furniture on eBay puts you off, there is every probability that similar treasures reside at your nearest flea market, yard sale or local antique shop. Craigslist is another possibility if you’re looking to source vintage furniture locally.
The quality of old furniture is far nicer than anything you can get in a flat-pack. Better yet, the prices are right where you’d hope they’d be: rock bottom. If antique furniture gets any cheaper, people will resort to turning it into firewood rather than selling it.
So is 2020 finally the year to buy antique furniture? I think the answer to that is a resounding “Yes”! The future is trending towards good quality, environmentally-friendly vintage furniture at affordable prices – something flat-pack IKEA junk can’t hope to match.
Read more thought-provoking Antique Sage trend articles here.
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