What amounts to Antique Furniture in law?
Can you please define what antique furniture is? and how old the furniture needs to be in order for it to be classified as antique? I was told that 100 years no longer applies! However i am not sure therefore, if anyone does have a clue I would really appreciate your answers.
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i thought it was 50 years
The age factor is subjective: general antique stores label objects 50 years or older as antiques. Fine antique dealers consider objects 150 years and older to be antique.In the East, an antique is Queen Anne or earlier; in the West, it’s any piece of furniture that came across the mountains in a wagon. A southern antique is a piece made before the Civil War.
Most states have no legal “definition”. It’s not a term in law.
50 years is considered antique for cars in some states; 25 in others.
100 years for furniture in some areas; 50 in others.
The word “antique” does not appear in my 1991 edition of Black’s Law Dictionary (perhaps it is an antique itself).
In the absence of a statute defining “antique furniture”, I’d say “anything no longer in production” is probably a good start.
I was in Customs & Excise in the early 90’s. Then it was a hundred years.
There are many loop holes though. Original art work – it a good excise avoider!
As far as I have been able to discover, it is still furniture which is over 100 years old which qualifies for the description “antique” in the UK, where we are used to old things. In younger cultures, the term might be more loosely applied to objects which we might be disposed to describe as “vintage”.
There is some uncertainty as to the definition of “antique.” I thought it was almost always intended to be more than 50 years old.
People need to be careful about certain furniture reproductions. My grandfather used to know a guy who bought lumber from old barns that were being torn down, and he made “antique” furniture from the wood. He would “embellish” his sales pitch by saying “this wood is more than 80 years old.” The wood was, but the furniture was less than a year old.