Antique Leather Chairs
Seat furniture upholstered in leather or hide, from mahogany desk and dining chairs with a leather seat to deep-buttoned wing and club armchairs made for the study, the office and the club room.
Antique Leather Chairs
The heading covers two quite different things. One is the wooden-framed chair with a leather seat or seat and back: desk, dining, library and elbow chairs, usually in mahogany or oak, with the polished frame on show. The other is the fully covered easy chair, where hide wraps the whole shell.
The single armchair dominates. `Armchair` appears in 751 titles and `armchairs` in another 389, and the qualifiers that ride on it most often are wing and club. A quarter of titles carry the word `pair`, so buying two rather than one is normal in this category rather than exceptional.
Desk and office chairs make up close to a fifth of the archive, with revolving and swivel seats a strong strand among them. Dining chairs and sets account for roughly another fifth, sold in fours and sixes but running up to twelve, fourteen and one set of fifteen. Library and Gainsborough-type show-wood armchairs are about a tenth, and French club and Swedish Art Deco chairs make up a smaller Continental group.
Dealer-entered dates run from 1750 to 1960, and where a clean year is given the weight sits in the early twentieth century: the 1920s is the largest decade, ahead of the 1930s and 1910s, with the 1880s and 1890s close behind. Plenty of listings use era labels instead, so 19th Century, Victorian, Edwardian and Regency turn up throughout. Georgian pieces appear, but as a small minority.
Where The Range Splits
Number counts first. Pairs of wing and club chairs, and dining sets of eight, ten, twelve and up, sit in the upper reaches of the sample. A single carved oak or mahogany chair with a drop-in leather seat sits at the bottom of it, and the deep-buttoned upholstered easy forms occupy the middle and upper bands.
Then the frame. Chairs described as Regency, George III or IV, or William IV cluster high; titles that say Georgian style or revival sit lower. Timber and decoration pull the same way, with mahogany, walnut and carved work above plain oak, and brass-inlaid, ormolu-mounted and burr walnut frames appearing at the top end.
Scale is its own axis. `Large` runs through 102 titles, and the very biggest library and throne chairs are described as overscale, monumental or enormous. Colour is named often enough to work as a search term on its own: green, red and brown, with morocco red and oxblood recurring on library and wing chairs.
Antique Leather Chairs Retail Price Guide 2026
Typical UK retail prices for leather chairs, 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.
The top sale of the last year on Sellingantiques was a set of eight Art Deco burr walnut cream leather cloud back chairs, in December 2025.
Gillows
The Antique Leather Chairs Glossary
- Wing, or wing back
- High-backed easy chair with projecting side panels to shelter the sitter's head. It leads the qualifiers on armchairs, appearing in 346 titles.
- Club chair
- Low, deep, fully leather-covered easy armchair, named in 274 titles. The French version is a recurring Continental strand.
- Buttoned, or deep buttoned
- Upholstery drawn into a pattern of sunken buttons. Buttoned appears in 116 titles and button in 55, mostly on wing, club and tub forms.
- Revolving
- A seat turning on a screw or swivel mechanism, standard on desk and office chairs and named in 200 titles.
- Carver
- The armchair in a dining set, as against the side chairs that make up the rest of it.
- Gainsborough
- Open armchair with an upholstered back and padded arm rests, one of the show-wood library types; 51 titles.
- Morocco
- A goatskin leather named in a handful of library-chair titles, often alongside a red or oxblood colour.
Antique Leather Chairs: Frequently Asked Questions
What is the most common type of leather chair?
The single leather-upholstered armchair. `Armchair` runs through 751 titles and `armchairs` through a further 389, framed most often in mahogany or oak.
Wing and club are the two qualifiers that attach to it most often. Beyond that, desk and office chairs and dining chairs each account for roughly a fifth of listings.
How old are leather chairs on Sellingantiques?
Dealer-entered dates span 1750 to 1960. Of 2,743 listings, 1,745 carry a clean year rather than an era label.
Where a year is given, the early twentieth century carries the weight: the 1920s is the largest single decade, then the 1930s and the 1910s, with the 1880s and 1890s just behind. Georgian and eighteenth-century chairs appear, but they are a small minority.
Are leather dining chairs sold in large sets?
Yes. Fours and sixes are the usual sizes, and `chairs` in the plural appears in 624 titles.
Sets get considerably larger than that. Alongside the sixes and eights, the archive has carried sets of ten, twelve, fourteen and one of fifteen.
Which colours of leather turn up most?
Green leads, named in 151 titles, with red in 117 and brown in 70.
Morocco red and oxblood recur on library and wing chairs. Colour is named often enough in titles to work as a search term in its own right.
Do French or Swedish leather chairs appear?
Both do. `French` appears in 178 titles, largely club armchairs, and `swedish` in 75.
The Swedish group is mostly pairs of deep-buttoned or satin-birch Art Deco armchairs, and several of them sit near the top of the range. Sweden is the recurring foreign origin after France.
What unusual leather chairs have come up?
Porter's hall chairs, throne chairs and reading chairs each appear only a handful of times across the whole archive.
Rarer still are the one-offs: a folding steamer deck chair, a machinist's high stool, a metamorphic child's high chair, a gaming high chair, cinema seats, an Anglo-Indian plantation chair and a pair of wrought iron Riviera chairs.