Most vintage furniture does not appreciate. What it does, reliably, is depreciate far more slowly than new furniture, which is a different and more useful thing. A new sofa loses most of its resale value the week it arrives. A nineteen-fifties teak sideboard bought sensibly tends to sell on for close to what you paid, because the supply is fixed and the material is better than anything at that price today. In the entry bracket, roughly two hundred and fifty to eighteen hundred dollars, you are buying furniture, not an asset. Value here holds when three things are true: solid timber rather than veneer over chipboard, a construction you can repair, and a shape that is not tied to one short-lived trend. Unattributed pieces sit in this bracket, and unattributed is not the same as bad. It usually just means nobody wrote the maker down. Prices in this bracket also move with fashion rather than with quality, so mid-century teak costs more than equivalent Edwardian mahogany today and that gap has reversed before. Buy the piece you want to live with, not the period the market currently likes.

Between roughly two thousand and six thousand dollars, attribution begins to carry the price. A credenza by a named Danish workshop and an anonymous credenza of identical quality can differ by a factor of three, and the difference is documentation. This is the bracket where reading the listing properly pays. Look for a maker's stamp, a model number, a workshop label, or a reference to a catalogue. Look also for what is missing, because a listing that says style of, attributed to, or in the manner of is telling you plainly that the paper trail stops. That is fine if you are buying the object. It matters a great deal if you expect to resell. Condition language does real work here too. Expertly restored can mean a sympathetic repair or it can mean a modern finish sprayed over original timber, and only one of those keeps the value. Ask specifically whether the piece has been refinished, since a stripped and resprayed surface can take a third off the price a specialist dealer would pay, even where the object looks better for it.

Above seven thousand dollars the object and its history are priced separately, and the history is often the larger share. Documented designer pieces, early production runs and anything with an unbroken record of ownership hold value best, because that is what the resale market can verify. This is also where the least value is held by the merely large. A vast handsome cabinet with no attribution is a wonderful thing to own and a slow thing to sell. If resale genuinely matters to you, buy narrow and documented rather than big and anonymous. Ask for the invoice history, ask what has been replaced, and ask whether the upholstery is original, because reupholstering a documented chair in a modern fabric can reduce what it makes at auction. And factor in shipping honestly, since crating a cabinet across an ocean can add a four-figure sum that no resale will return to you.

We would buy vintage because it is better made and better looking at the price, and treat any value it holds as a bonus rather than a plan. If you want an asset, this is not the category. If you want a sideboard that will still be a sideboard in thirty years, it is the only sensible category. We would avoid buying at the top of the market for resale reasons alone, and we would be sceptical of any listing where the condition notes are shorter than the design history. Read the notes, not the romance. One more thing: the pieces that hold value are almost never the ones that photograph best, because a perfect finish on an old piece usually means it has been refinished. If you take one thing away, pay for documentation and solid timber, and let the patina stay where it is.