Galleries, museums, palaces – they are all places where you can see antique furniture. With a unique style, often interesting history and worth thousands of pounds, antique furniture is sought after by many who appreciate its value. But how about a common person who comes across an old-fashioned piece of furniture? How can they know if it is an antique? What characteristics does it have and how can we determine if it is a real antique or only a reproduction?

According to the U.S. Customs Service, an antique is an item with at least 100 years of age. Features such as the type of wood and furniture construction can help you determine whether a wardrobe you are looking at is actually an antique. It needs to be remembered, though, that classifying a piece of furniture is not an easy task.

If it is a wardrobe, we can start by opening a drawer and having a look at the dovetails. If they are all arranged nicely and neatly it means it is probably a machine made piece, not an antique. A machine can cut out each side in exactly the same way and does not allow for any differences or mistakes. Furthermore, pieces of modern style furniture are put together with a lot of glue, which was not practiced a hundred years ago. So if you see an un-uniformed drawer, which has got only three dovetails, you are probably looking at a hand-cut dovetail produced in the eighteen hundreds.

According to an estate specialist, you should also see the nails in order to assess how old furniture is. If it has square nail heads on it, that is indicative of a piece from the ninetieth century.

Equally important is to determine the type of wood the furniture is made of. Oak, mahogany and walnut are all materials used during the antique period because of their abundance. Moreover, the piece of board on antique furniture is also likely to be wider. That is due to the fact that many years ago it was extremely difficult to cut and splice a piece of wood. The lack of electronic equipment, which we have access to nowadays, made it impossible to cut the wood the way people wanted. Instead, they had to use what they could cut out from a tree. Therefore, antique furniture often has wide pieces of wood on top.

If you look at a piece of furniture and can see that it is not made of an old type of wood, its elements are cut out perfectly and there are metal sliders in a drawer, you will know it is a reproduction piece. However, if you like an old-fashioned style but are not an antique connoisseur, you might still want to consider having reproductions at home.

Inspired by the Victorian style and influenced by its history, many traditional furniture reproductions, such as bedside tables, dining room chairs or cherry cabinets, are made in exactly the same way as the originals. They look as if they were made more than a hundred years ago. Additionally, they will last you much longer than original Victorian furniture. Thanks to reproductions you can enjoy an antique style in your house, without having to spend thousands of pounds for real antique pieces.

A avid writer with over twenty years of actual experience in the antique furniture industry. Having worked at a number of locations; Jessica has dealt with varieties of high quality antique and reproduction furniture and knows about everything from mahogany dining tables to cherry wood cabinets. http://www.charlesbarr.com/

A avid writer with over twenty years of actual experience in the http://www.charlesbarr.com/ antique furniture industry. Having worked at a number of locations; Jessica has dealt with varieties of high quality antique and reproduction furniture and knows about everything from mahogany dining tables to http://www.charlesbarr.com/cherry-wood-large-display-cabinet cherry wood cabinets. http://www.charlesbarr.com/ http://www.charlesbarr.com/

Author Bio: A avid writer with over twenty years of actual experience in the antique furniture industry. Having worked at a number of locations; Jessica has dealt with varieties of high quality antique and reproduction furniture and knows about everything from mahogany dining tables to cherry wood cabinets. http://www.charlesbarr.com/

Category: Arts and Crafts
Keywords: dining tables, antique furniture, bedside tables, dining chairs, cherry wood cabinets