Antique Gun Cabinets
A gun cabinet is a hardwood case made to hold sporting guns upright, either hung on a wall or standing on the floor, enclosed or glazed for display.
Antique Gun Cabinets
Purpose-made cases for storing sporting guns became standard country-house and gunroom furniture in the nineteenth century, as breech-loading shotguns and rifles came into general use and owners wanted them held upright, visible and away from damp. Some were made as glazed display cases, others as plainer racks or wall cases.
The ones that reach Sellingantiques are solid hardwood. Mahogany is named in two of the five listings, oak in one. Forms run from a small mahogany wall cabinet through a floor-standing oak display cabinet to a substantial carved English case of 1860 described as being in the Romanesque manner. No two are alike, so the category as it appears on this site is a handful of one-off pieces rather than a repeating type.
The nearest thing to a recurring form is the Edwardian mahogany cabinet, which covers two of the five, one of them wall-mounted. Wall-hung examples are otherwise absent; every other piece stands on the floor.
Dating sits between the mid-nineteenth century and the Edwardian period, with nothing earlier than 1860 and nothing later. Only two listings carry a clean year, 1860 and 1890. The rest are given as period labels, Edwardian or Victorian, and one title hedges to "Early 20thc". This is a thin category: about one comes to market a year, and only four dealers have ever listed one.
Where The Range Sits
Scale and format do most of the work. The wall cabinet sits at the bottom of the range, while the floor-standing oak display cabinet and the large nineteenth-century case sit well above it. A hanging case holds fewer guns and asks less of the cabinetmaker, and the range reflects that.
Age separates the two ends cleanly. The Edwardian mahogany cabinets cluster at the bottom, the 1890 and 1860 pieces at the top, with nothing between them. Decoration follows the same line: the only cabinet described stylistically, the Romanesque one, is the highest-priced of the five by a wide margin.
Two smaller things push a cabinet upward. The word "display" appears in a single title, on the late Victorian oak floor-standing piece, and it is priced above both plain mahogany cabinets. A named retail source does the same, the one title recording Army and Navy Stores standing second in the range.
Antique Gun Cabinets Retail Price Guide 2026
Typical UK retail prices for gun cabinets, calculated from the Sellingantiques database of over a million retail prices indexed since 2003. This retail price guide relies exclusively on Sellingantiques data; no external sources or auction records are used, so the figures do not describe the wider market.
Cabinet started life as a little cabin, a small private room, long before it meant furniture or a government.
The Antique Gun Cabinets Glossary
- Gun cabinet
- A case made to hold long guns upright, whether enclosed or open-fronted.
- Wall cabinet
- A cabinet made to hang rather than stand on the floor. One of the five listings on Sellingantiques is described this way.
- Floor standing
- A full-height cabinet resting on the floor, as opposed to a hanging or table case.
- Display cabinet
- A case meant for the guns to be seen in rather than simply stored away.
- Romanesque manner
- A dealer's term for heavy round-arched revival ornament, used once, of the earliest and highest-priced piece in the archive.
- XIX Century
- Roman-numeral form of nineteenth century, as one dealer writes it in a title. "Early 20thc" is the same shorthand at the other end.
Antique Gun Cabinets: Frequently Asked Questions
How often do antique gun cabinets come up for sale?
About one a year is listed on Sellingantiques, and only four dealers have ever handled one. That makes it one of the thinner categories on the site.
With five examples in the whole archive, no two of them alike, there is no standard model to compare a listing against.
What woods were gun cabinets made from?
Solid hardwood throughout. Mahogany is the timber named most often, in two of the five listings.
Oak appears exactly once, in the late Victorian floor-standing display cabinet.
Are wall-mounted gun cabinets common?
Not in this archive. A wall-hung cabinet turns up once, an early twentieth-century mahogany one, and every other example is a standing piece.
It also sits at the bottom of the range, below both the floor-standing oak cabinet and the larger nineteenth-century case.
What period do these cabinets date from?
The whole archive falls between the mid-nineteenth century and the Edwardian period. The dated field spans 1860 to 1890, and nothing earlier or later appears.
Only two listings carry a clean year. The other three are given as period labels, Edwardian or Victorian, with one title using "Early 20thc".
Do any gun cabinets carry a maker or retailer name?
One does. A single title names Army and Navy Stores as the source, and that is the only origin of any kind recorded in the category.
That cabinet stands second in the range. The remaining four carry no name at all.
Which gun cabinets sit at the top of the range?
The nineteenth-century pieces. The 1860 English case in the Romanesque manner is the highest-priced of the five by a wide margin, and the 1890 oak display cabinet follows.
The Edwardian mahogany cabinets sit at the bottom, with nothing in between the two groups.