Old Pieces Of Furniture That Are Worth A Ton Of Money

While there is a well-known list of items that we know become more valuable with time, many people are unaware of how valuable old furniture can be. When you think about furniture, you're more likely to think about valuable coins you may have laying around underneath, or inside the folds of your sofa. However, collectors know that design elements and provenance — the historical journey of a collectible item that helps auction houses, museums, and galleries authenticate and value a piece — are what can make old furniture collections quite lucrative.

Where contemporary furniture is concerned, pieces from the early 19th century, particularly between 1933 to 1965, are sought after by collectors. For example, a quick browse on ebay will show you a number of antique furniture pieces like a post-1950s vintage American oak desk on offer for $3,000, or a 19th Century reading chair for $8,500. Even with the big change to eBay seller fees in 2024, the owners of these furniture pieces are going to walk away with a big payday if they can sell them. While these numbers are impressive, the older the provenance, and the higher the craftsmanship behind the furniture, the more valuable they become. Here's how valuable old furniture can get. 

Founded in 1977 by married architects Abdolhay and Parvaneh Parnian, Parnian is a high end family-run furniture and accessories empire with two stores taking up 9,000 square feet of space in Scottsdale, Arizona. The company's clients include a who's who of the wealthiest people, including Madonna, Oprah Winfrey, and members of the Rothschild family. While buying expensive furniture may not come as a surprising habit of millionaires, if you understand that one of the common habits of the world's wealthiest people includes leaning into additional moneymaking opportunities — like spending money on appreciative assets — buying high quality furniture made from rare materials and textiles is just a good investment.

One of those items is the Parnian Desk. Sourced from half a dozen different foreign woods, the large wooden desk has a curvy design with a specially designed glass covering over it. The custom made piece took five months to design and manufacture, and was made to act as a show piece for clients visiting their showroom in Arizona. With a $200,000 price tag, this is more for a CEO than the average cubicle worker.

Seizo Sugawara was a Japanese expat who arrived in Paris in 1905. While he began his career working with a French jeweler, his star began to rise after collaborating with designer Eileen Grey, an Irish expat architect and designer, also working in Paris who would become quite famous for old pieces of furniture herself. His touch as a sculptor and lacquer show up in his most famous work. The Seizo Sugawara armchair, released in 1915, was adorned with a silver and gold leaf and intricately carved lacquered wood.

After a previous owner brought the arm chair to a smaller auction house in a Parisian suburb, neither of whom recognized the chair was worth anything more than $200 or $300, the chair was placed on auction and purchased by a knowledgeable collector for around $206,000. In November 2024, the armchair found its way back into a Phillips auction, and this time everyone apparently knew what this furniture was worth. The armchair sold for $315,580.

Peder Moos was a Danish designer and woodworker who started his career as a cabinet maker in Copenhagen in the 1900s before going on to study at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. Although he wasn't known to be hyper-prolific in terms of output, the work he put out was known to always be of extreme high quality with its own distinct look. Although Moos passed away on April 1, 1991, his legacy would live on in designs like his oak desk, which would posthumously earn him a world auction record for Nordic design.

As the most expensive piece of Nordic design ever auctioned, Peder Moos Oak Desk was a one off design for the Aubertin family — a wealthy Danish family that made their money in timber — back in 1952. The record, previously held by Danish architect and designer Finn Juhl for an armchair that sold at auction for £422,500 in 2013 — just over $524,000 today — was smashed by Peder Moos Oak Desk at a Phillips auction two years later when it sold for £602,500, the equivalent of around $744,000.

While there isn't much information on this next piece of furniture, there's no false advertising in its title. Made in China's Jiangsu province, this stool is 110 pounds of solid gold. The stool was sold by a jeweler in the province for an amount equal to $1.3 million. Ironically, gold and other precious minerals are some of the goods we buy from China that could be affected by Trump's Tariffs.

If you were the owner of this stool, this would be a good time to sell if you could find a buyer who could actually afford it. A side effect of the Tariff war between China and the U.S. is the price of gold making a rapid ascent in the markets. Factors like looming economic uncertainty are what controls the price of gold, and a $1.3 million gold stool would be a pretty safe asset to have right now. 

Pininfarina specializes in the design of several categories including architecture and automotive — including the design work for Maserati GranTurismo and Ferrari, the latter up until Ferrari created its own design studio — and in an Apartment Therapy article, when several designers are asked what designers they would have in their dream homes, Brigette Romanek of Romanek Design Studio called the Pininfarina's Ares line Xten Office Chair "the Ferrari of office chairs."

That of course, could only be included in a dream home. Technogel, a high grade polyurethane material, and an Olympian-level fabric called Dynatec are the secret in office chairs that reduce tension on your backside and apparently makes you feel less tired at work by as much as 60%. While we're not sure of the specifics behind how that's gauged, with a price tag of $1.5 million for one, we'll take the word for it.

Bed, Bath, and Beyond is one of several beloved retail brands that have declared bankruptcy in recent years. If the company had numerous stock of this next bed on our list, they may not have had to. Janjaap Ruijssenaar is the Dutch architect and designer behind the world's first 3-D printed house, and the Magnetic Floating Bed. In his early days of study, as per an interview with Creative Chair, he asked his father, Hans Ruijssenaars, a question about architects and what binds them all together. The answer his father gave him was "gravity." That was the spark of inspiration Ruijssenaars needed to research how to construct his Magnetic Floating Bed, a piece of furniture deriving its power from magnetism instead of gravity.

The scale model for the floating bed was built with the help of specialists over six years, and could carry 176 pounds. The lifesize bed carries up to 1,984 pounds. Powered by magnets in the floor and the bed itself, the magnetic bed floats in the air, only held to the ground by four thin cables on the corners of the bed. The scale model alone is valued at $146,953. The human-sized bed will run you just over $1.5 million.

Australian designer Mark Newson built 10 of his Lockheed Lounge chairs, one of which ended up in a 1993 Madonna music video. The lounge is made from aluminum plates welded around fiberglass-reinforced plastic, and rubber padding on top for comfort. On April 28, 2015, one of Newsom's Loungers was placed on auction by Phillips alongside several other exclusive pieces of furniture. The Lockheed Lounge found a buyer in the form of a telephone bidder with deep pockets. How deep?

This piece of furniture was picked up for a cool $3.7 million, which was a record breaking sale for Newsom at the time, and was on the high end of the estimated $2.2 million to $3.7 million the bid was valued at. Other Lockheed Lounge chairs have been purchased for the permanent collection of highly-esteemed design museums around the world, including the Powerhouse Museum in Australia and the Vitra Design Museum in Germany. 

Considered the Shakespeare of English furniture makers, Thomas Chippendale became one of the most celebrated cabinetmakers of the 18th century. By 1754, he was already making a name for himself after launching his own furniture publication — The Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker's Director — sought after by everyone from tradespeople to wealthy nobles. Believed to have been made between the years 1755 to 1760, George II Parcel Gilt Padauk Cabinet traces its provenance as far back to a Sir and Lady Palmer, who were wealthy enough to own 80,000 acres in the 1700s. It's believed that Sir Palmer commissioned the intricate cabinet work, adorned with grand ornamental flourishes and carvings of rocks, leaves, and floral elements, for their estate. Originally covered in gold, the cabinet now has a water-gilt finish, which does little to reduce its value or the golden sheen of the three large canopies sitting on top of the cabinet like individual crowns. In a 2008 Christie's auction, the George II Parcel Gilt Padauk Cabinet sold for $3.9 million.

Thomas Tuft was born in 1740 and lived until 1788 in Philadelphia. Before the end of his life, sometime between 1775 and 1776, Tufft made his masterpiece Tufft Table. This elegant hand carved piece of furniture would turn out to be the world's most expensive table at auction, beating out the previous record holder's $1.5 million price tag. The table is believed to have been custom made for Richard Edwards of Lumberton, New Jersey, a wealthy connoisseur of upscale furnishings and Quaker businessman who was also the owner of two chairs by the aforementioned Thomas Chippendale. He may have commissioned the work for a mansion he built in Taunton, New Jersey, although Philadelphia tax records between 1769 and 1789 reveal Edwards also owned properties in Philadelphia during Thomas Tufft's heyday.

In January 1990, a Christie's auction would make history when the sale of Thomas Tufft's table, made for a patron over 200 years earlier, was sold to a bidder for just over $4.6 million, making it the most expensive table ever.

When you hear the word commode, you may think of a fancy word for the toilet. While it is true that the word does have some origins in that usage, for collectors of rare furniture, it also describes artisan furniture from the 18th Century, specifically a French cabinet or chest of drawers. Actually, the original usage of the word commode was for the latter, coming from the French translation for something convenient or suitable for a particular purpose. The toilet association comes from the usage of the cabinets to hold chamber pots. It was a popular piece of furniture initially for the aristocracy, but by the 19th century it was sought after by households in the lower classes.

We've already told you about the importance of Thomas Chippendale as the British furniture designer of his age, and he can also take credit for The Harrington Commode, which Henry House, the head of English furniture at Sotheby's London is quoted in Apollo Magazine as stating, "This is from towards the end of his working life, the golden period, with that delicate marquetry and the mounts. Very few pieces of this quality come to auction." That shows in the 2010 record breaking auction bid at Sotheby's London, when The Harrington Commode sold for over $5 million.

Robert Clive was a military man and administrator with the British colonial East India Company before his success in battle earned him a position as governor of Bengal. At the time, the Brits had assumed control over Southern India after taking it from the French army and the governor of Bengal. While Clive's humanity could be called into question — his decisions to raise taxes and lower wages among a series of droughts and floods are believed to have led to a famine which claimed the lives of 3 million Indians — the wealth he amassed after looting the treasury allowed him the ability to decorate his home with artisan-made furniture.

Dating back to 1767, The Clive of India Sofa was assembled with elements including teakwood, ivory, and fine silk. The sofa found its way into an auction house where it sold for $7.8 million before spending the next 60 years in a UK museum collection in Cardiff, Wales. 

The Malachite Casket is named after the mineral malachite, which makes up the majority of materials used to make the fancy urn. Malachite is a shimmering green copper ore found in a few countries across the globe, mainly the Ural mountains in Russia, where the piece originally hails from. Once owned by the family of the Russian Czar around 1830, the Malachite Casket eventually ended up in Chicago in 1893. Other elements include bronze, courtesy of a French bronze caster who also holds the distinction of building Napoleon's casket.

The casket was apparently commissioned by the Czar and was passed down for several generations until it was purchased at auction for $10 million. Unsurprisingly, this places the Malachite Casket on an exclusive list of furniture worth millions of dollars. In 2013, it became part of an exhibition of Imperial Russian collections at the Lightner Museum in St. Augustine, Florida, themed after the movie "Anna Karenina" with curator-themed tours. 

The Townsend family of Newport, RI had a legacy of building cabinetry of the highest quality and creativity. Perhaps the most well known of all the Townsend's, John Townsend, crafted an antique secretary desk back in the 1760s, sold out of the furniture shop of cabinetmaker John Goddard — the Goddard's and Townsend's were related by marriage and married in business.

Aside from the intricately carved design work and quality of materials, the rarity of this piece makes it all the more valuable. Apparently, there were only nine desks ever made, and only when one found its way into a Christie's auction in 1989 did the world learn the true value of one. After selling for more than double the highest estimated bid for the 223-year-old American made furniture piece, and selling for more than four times more than the most expensive piece of furniture auctioned at the time by Christie's, the Goddard and Townsend desk went on to sell at a furniture dealer in New York for $12.1 million.

You may recognize the name of the Irish architect and designer behind this next piece of furniture. Eileen Grey collaborated with another furniture design legend on this list, Seizo Sugawara, on his armchair, and it turns out she was no slouch either. Called the Dragon chair, the furniture bears two curved dragons carved into the armrests, and inspired by Chinese cultural representations of dragons in art. The lacquered dragons on the wooden chair contrast in the best way with the buttery leather upholstery of the arm chair. The curved form of the chair is meant to be reminiscent of a pearl in its shell — you, if you were sitting in it — which along with the dragon, represents strength in Chinese culture.

Constructed between the years 1917 and 1919, the chair was estimated to sell for $2.3 million at a Christie's auction in 2017. Up until then, the owner of the chair was no less than Yves St Laurent, another universally renowned designer in the fashion industry. Quality knows quality, as evidenced by Yves St Laurent being recognized as one of several luxury clothing brands actually worth your money. The chair ended up going back to Paris thanks to art dealer Cheska Vallois, who won the chair on her bid for a little over $28.3 million. That's more than 12 times the original estimated bid.

Last but not least is the most expensive piece of furniture on this list, the Badminton Cabinet. The cabinet had been located in the same part of Badminton, UK for over 200 years, and was already a record holder for most expensive piece of furniture in the world after it was sold to billionaire Barbara Piasecka Johnson in 1990 for over $16 million. Johnson married into the Johnson and Johnson empire after having been hired as a cook and maid by Esther Underwood Johnson — the first wife of the Johnson and Johnson heir J. Seward Johnson Sr. — and having an affair with her former boss' husband. Aside from classical art paintings and drawings by artists including Rembrandt and Botticelli, she amassed a pretty impressive collection of 18th Century furniture.

A Christie's auction in 2004 would lead to the Badminton Cabinet breaking its own record after Prince Hans Adam II of Liechtenstein — himself a billionaire and among the wealthiest royal families in Europe — purchased the cabinet with a winning bid of over $36 million. The royal donated the furniture to the Liechtenstein Museum in Austria.