Regency Chest of Drawers between £0 and £0
A Regency chest of drawers is English bedroom and dressing-room furniture: a case of long drawers on bracket or splayed feet, veneered in mahogany, made in the first three decades of the 19th century.
What Are They?
Mahogany is named in the great majority of titles on Sellingantiques, and a bowed front in a third of them, so the plain-topped mahogany bow-front chest is the category's default. Four long drawers, or two short over three long, on bracket or splayed feet. The commonest title in the archive is a version of "Regency mahogany bow front chest of drawers", often with c1820 attached.
Roughly the other half of the mahogany group is straight or flat-fronted, titled simply as a Regency mahogany chest, sometimes with graduated drawers. Dealers describe the curved front four different ways, bow front, bow fronted, bowfront and bow-fronted, and a couple reach for barrel fronted or D-shaped for the same shape.
Away from mahogany, painted and pine chests make a small stream of their own, and dealers of those tend to specify original paint rather than just painted. Then a scatter of other forms: secretaire chests, tallboys and chest-on-chests, Wellington and campaign chests, and small, narrow or miniature examples.
Read Regency in the date field as a style label rather than a year. It carries 552 listings, with 19th Century, 1800s and Georgian behind it, and only 74 of 838 give a clean year. Those years run 1800 to 1930, the later end being frankly labelled Regency-style pieces of the 1900s to 1920s. In titles, c1820 is by far the most cited.
The Range
Timber and figure do most of the sorting. Flame and figured mahogany are written into titles because they lift a chest above the plain, and above that sit the single appearances of satinwood, rosewood, burr walnut, burr elm, pollard oak, Karelian birch, amboyna, partridge wood and yew. At the bottom of the range: country-made and solid pine, plain mahogany.
Decoration follows the same line. Inlaid chests, with boxwood or ebony stringing, brass inlay, or satinwood and rosewood crossbanding, sit above undecorated ones. So do the details dealers bother to title, oak-lined drawers, a brushing slide, original brasses, original paint on the pine chests.
Form and scale finish the argument. Serpentine, concave and D-fronted examples, and anything fitted as a secretaire or a campaign chest, sit above the plain rectangle; teak, camphorwood and brass binding come in with the military pieces. Genuinely small and narrow chests carry a premium, miniature and apprentice pieces likewise, with ordinary bedroom size the middle ground. A pair, which turns up two or three times in the whole archive, sits near the top.
Retail Price Guide 2026
Typical UK retail prices for regency chest of drawers between £0 and £0, 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 Regency mahogany and ebony chest of drawers, in June 2026.
The Regency Chest of Drawers between £0 and £0 Glossary
- Bow front
- The front curved convexly across its width. Also written bow fronted, bowfront or bow-fronted, and occasionally barrel fronted or D-shaped for the same effect.
- Two over three
- The commonest drawer arrangement, two short drawers above three long ones. Graduated drawers means they get deeper toward the bottom.
- Brushing slide
- A pull-out board above the top drawer for laying out clothes. Slide appears in 11 titles.
- Secretaire chest
- A chest whose top drawer front drops to reveal a fitted writing interior. It accounts for 28 titles.
- Oak lined
- Drawer sides and bottoms of oak rather than pine, a construction note dealers put in the title because it reads as quality.
- Wellington chest
- A tall narrow chest of many small drawers with a hinged locking pilaster down one side.
Frequently Asked Questions
What wood are they usually made from?
Mahogany, named in the great majority of titles on Sellingantiques. It appears as solid timber and as veneer, with flame and figured cuts cited separately when a dealer thinks the figure worth naming.
The exceptions are thin on the ground. Painted and stripped pine forms a small stream, and single listings bring in satinwood, rosewood, burr walnut, pollard oak, Karelian birch, amboyna, partridge wood and yew.
Does Regency mean the piece dates to 1811-20?
Not as the field is used. Regency here is the dealer's style label, and it sits on 552 listings against only 74 that give a clean year.
The named years run from 1800 to 1930, with c1820 written into 88 titles, the most cited year in the category by a wide margin. The later dates belong to Regency-style and Georgian Regency design pieces of the 1900s to 1920s.
The title is where a year usually turns up.
How common is the bow front?
A third of titles describe one, and mahogany bow together accounts for 181. It's the single shape most associated with the category.
The rest of the mahogany group is straight or flat-fronted, sometimes titled as a chest of graduated drawers.
Are there makers' names attached to these?
No. A scan of the whole archive for maker candidates returned nothing at all, so this is a category read by timber, form and decoration rather than by signature.
What titles do carry instead is construction detail, oak-lined drawers, brushing slides, original brasses, and the odd regional label.
Which types are the small and unusual ones?
Small appears in 75 titles, with narrow in 10, and phrases like dwarf and of small proportions recur. Miniature and apprentice chests account for 14, among them a burr yew apprentice piece and a rosewood miniature.
Campaign and military chests are scarcer still at 9 titles, and they bring teak, camphorwood and brass binding into a category otherwise built from mahogany.
How many come up for sale each year?
Around 89 a year on Sellingantiques, from a pool of 181 different dealers who have listed one at some point.
That's close to a chest apiece, which tells you this is a form almost every general furniture dealer keeps in stock sooner or later.