Antique Furniture - Vintage, Mid-Century Furniture

Your online source to find vintage and antique furniture for sale

Dexileos is an online vintage and antique marketplace featuring furniture, among other decorative arts and fine arts. The specialty of our antiques market is that we want to reproduce on an online platform the experience of going to an antique show. Similar to when you go to an antique market or fair, Dexileos allows you to know which seller is behind each piece of furniture so you can freely interact with them.

This total transparency about the full stock presented on our site by each antique dealer is paramount. The comprehensive view of their portfolio gives you an understanding of their taste, specialties, and standards. For instance, some sellers may excel in Scandinavian furniture while others are passionate about 18th-century furniture. When you spot dealers that interest you, you will be able to follow them as your favorite dealers if you create a buyer’s profile.

Our antique marketplace: More antique furniture for sale than vintage furniture

If you love antiques, you are clearly in the right place. Indeed, you will find more antique furniture than vintage furniture on Dexileos, which explains why we call it an antique marketplace. Antiques are our forte. One of our founders was an antique dealer at the Paris Saint-Ouen Flea Market, the largest and most prestigious antique market in the world before starting Proantic, a leading online antique marketplace in Europe. Thus, it comes as no surprise that furniture on Dexileos is about 80% antique furniture, essentially European antique furniture. Yet, antique furniture and vintage furniture have a connection and make for good partners. So that you fully appreciate what is on this site, let’s clarify what antique furniture and vintage furniture mean.

Antique furniture and vintage furniture: Definitions, differences, and similarities

Defining antique furniture is simple: an antique has to be at least a hundred years old. Thus, any furniture over one hundred years old is antique furniture. Less than a hundred years old, this is vintage. Consequently, from a pure period perspective, art deco (roughly, between 1918 and 1939) is on the cusp between antique and vintage. Defining vintage furniture is more complicated than antique furniture because, in addition to the quantitative aspect of the years, there is a qualitative aspect. The straightforward part is that vintage furniture is at least twenty years old, implying that not all secondhand or used furniture is vintage furniture. Thus, any furniture more recent than 1990 is not vintage. On top of this, a vintage piece also needs to denote a certain quality or be representative of the style of a period. If you think of the original meaning of ‘vintage’ associated with wine, a vintage refers to a particular year. Knowing the year is important to fully understand the characteristics of the wine. And you keep a vintage wine for its qualities and potential over the years to come. Why would you want to store or serve a bad wine? It is the same for vintage furniture. In recent years, the most popular trend in vintage furniture has undeniably been Mid-Century Modern (MCM) covering 1940s-1960s recognizable by its clean lines aiming for functionality. But vintage furniture also includes some remarkable classical pieces as you can see on our 20th-century furniture page. Note how many of them are imbued with styles pertaining to the 18th century, as the Golden Age of European cabinet-making remains a constant source of inspiration. In other words, some vintage furniture has the look of antique furniture. In summary, what antique furniture and vintage furniture share in common:

• They were used before.
• Each piece has a story of its own and a unique patina.
• They have been passed down through several owners thanks to outstanding physical and decorative qualities.

How to search through vintage and antique furniture in our antique marketplace

Finding the right antique is like a treasure hunt. Shopping for vintage and antique furniture is radically different from acquiring contemporary furniture. With antique furniture, each piece is unique in an obvious or more subtle way. Finding a hidden gem requires searching. An online antique marketplace benefits from the intelligence and power of information technology. Yet, organizing a large inventory from various sources with furniture names that evolved over time and have been different depending on the country of origin is no walk in the park. Consequently, pieces that fit your needs today may have quite distinct functional origins and may be placed in different categories. That is why altogether when exploring vintage and antique furniture in our online market, we advise you to use several methods.

• From the listing of all vintage & antique furniture for sale, use the filters on the left to select the appropriate furniture category, style, and period.
• Use the search box (identified with the magnifying glass in the top navigation of each page). This search functionality may bring more results than through a category. Let’s take an example. Imagine you’re looking for an antique sofa. Note how selecting the Sofas category retrieves fewer items than searching with sofa. Moreover, while we are developing material and origin filters, the search box is the best workaround. For instance, let’s suppose you are after a French commode (or chest of drawers). The best way to approach it is to search for ‘French’. Then, on the results page, under Categories on the left (ordered alphabetically), pick ‘Chest of Drawers’.
• With this same search box, you can insert ‘or’ to connect related searches. For instance, observe this comprehensive search for an antique drop front writing desk. Note the full search request: secretaire or secretary or bureau or slant.
• Use the advanced search as a price filter to narrow down your searches to a specific price range.

Now, with all this information on vintage and antique furniture, enjoy the treasure hunt!