Antique Dining Tables and Chairs

Antique dining tables are always in demand, but this time of year (Article published January 2007) is the best time to buy one. Festive celebrations are well and truly completed, so prices naturally dip as auction rooms and dealers realise that the back end of the year’s demand for such tables has died off. After Christmas, dining-table sales really dwindle off, but come September everybody seems to want one. It therefore makes sense to buy now, as there won’t be as much competition in the auction rooms and dealers will be happy to give decent discounts to move stock on.

So, now that we’re a bit savvy about picking the right time of year to buy an antique dining table, it’s nice to know that they are also usable, practical, good value for money, and great long-term investments.

Just imagine all the history they’ve seen – kings and queens coming and going, wars, threats of invasions, booms and depressions, Christmas parties, drunken celebrations, family get-togethers, and goodness knows what else. All of this hard use over many generations has created a unique lustre, colour, and patination, something that even the very best reproduction dining tables can never achieve – and I still find it odd that I can buy an original, antique dining table for less money than a reproduction one. Why so many people buy reproduction tables, therefore, is beyond me, especially when the repro becomes almost worthless the moment you get it home.

With an antique table, there’ll be some old scars and marks on the top surface, the odd scuffed leg, and a faded area or two, but this just adds interest and character and is one of the things that makes antiques what they are. You needn’t be too precious about owning antiques, which means you can really use and slightly abuse your antique dining table without being petrified that you’ll devalue it. If you add the odd mark or scratch here and there, who cares? Just bung some wax on! Buy one in good and solid condition and it will last you forever. Then, when and if you decide to sell it, maybe to retire to a smaller house, sell it on and it’ll pay for a nice little cruise – which is a lot more than can be said about your expensive reproductions.

The biggest headache is finding a dining table with a set of original chairs.

It takes time to search out the right table, and if you want matching chairs too, you’ll be in for a shock. I have never bought an antique dining table with its original chairs. You see, if a dining table and set of chairs were made 200 years ago, there is every chance that the table and chairs have been split amongst family at some time after someone had died and the property had been shared out.

We must also remember that even though a Georgian dining table or sets of chairs are valuable today, they were once nothing more than second-hand, old-fashioned pieces of furniture that not many people wanted. If they weren’t all that valuable a hundred years ago, then it wouldn’t have mattered if they were split up, given to the servants, made into work benches, or burnt on Bonfire Night – and apparently fine Georgian table tops made great sledges. So, apart from the odd dining sets that have lived all their lives in one house, we can start to understand why such sets are incredibly rare.

There are also quite a few older reproduction sets around from the 1920’s. These are pretty good quality and are fabulous value for money, but don’t get them confused with the genuine article – and if you want the real thing, always buy from a reputable dealer or auction room, or take professional advice.

Although it is rare to find period matched sets, it is easily possible to find antique tables and chairs that complement one another, and anyway, anyone who loves antiques will enjoy hunting around the shops and auctions in order to make up their own set.

Prices, as always, vary hugely, but you can pay as little as £500 for a decent and usable 200-year-old Georgian dining table to many hundreds of thousands for the very rarest. Likewise, chairs start at around £300 for a good set of four Victorian balloon-backs to mind-boggling sums for rarities.

Antique buying is a funny game, though, and you’ve got to be prepared for disappointments. For example, if you see a table in an antique shop and you really like it and can afford it, don’t spend too much time thinking about it, because once it’s gone it’s gone, and you’ll never see it again.

Auctions can be disappointing, too, especially when items sell for many times their estimate. Recently, for example, I was in an auction room buying some furniture with a client. We both loved a set of 12 late eighteenth-century Hepplewhite-design mahogany dining chairs. They were completely gorgeous, but way out of our price range. Still, we hung about just to see how much they would make. With an estimate of £7000 to £9000, I, as the expert(!), suggested they’d make about £10,000.

Sadly, it didn’t take long for the bidders to make me look totally stupid, as the price was quickly battled up to £20,000. The auctioneer was about to knock the chairs down to a buyer sat at the front of the room when two telephone bidders started scrapping for them and the price rocketed on to finally finish at £47,000! Plus £7,000 commission for the auction house. So much for estimates.

Something to note – if £300 can buy four Victorian chairs, one might think that the same chairs but in a set of eight could be bought for double the price. Not at all. More like three or four times the price. Again, the same is true for dining tables. The bigger they are, the more they can seat, the bigger the dining room they go into, the more cash you need. This rule doesn’t apply to other antique furniture, where generally the smaller an item is the higher the price. It’s an odd business.

Here are a couple of my favourite antique dining tables.

Loo Tables

These are Victorian oval-shaped tables that seat four to six people, normally made from figured and inlayed walnut. They’re quite flashy tables with fancy legs and tops that can tilt upright, enabling them to be stored and displayed in corners.

They were designed for and named after the Victorian card game ‘Loo’, so they were actually originally games tables.

Unfortunate name, yes, but they make great dining tables.

D-Ended Tables

First made in the eighteenth century, these tables are seriously desirable. They consist of two D-shaped tables with a number of leaf sections in between that can extend the tables to varying lengths. The two D ends can also push together to make a circular table.

These tables are designed so that they are easy to dismantle quickly. Put the leaves in a cupboard and the two D-shaped tables against a wall, and suddenly you have space in the middle of the dining room big enough to play parlour games and dance the night away … Obviously invented before the introduction of TV!

David Harper 2007