Antique Enfilades between £0 and £0
An enfilade is a long, low cupboard with its doors in a single row and nothing above the top, built as French dining-room storage for linen, tableware and food.
What Is An Enfilade?
The form is simple: three or four panelled doors under one continuous top, no upper stage, no superstructure. The name describes the row of doors in a line. It grew up as provincial French case furniture and carried on in much the same shape through the 18th and 19th centuries.
The one you're most likely to meet is French and 19th century. "French" appears in 94 of 146 titles on Sellingantiques, making national origin the single most reliably stated fact in the category, and 69 listings carry "19th Century" as their date. Only 53 listings give a clean year at all, so century-level dating is the norm, and it can be internally loose where a title and a date field disagree.
Surface splits the field. Paint edges ahead of bare timber, 46 titles against 41 for oak, with bleached oak alone accounting for 15 of those. Beyond oak the timbers run long: cherry, walnut, chestnut, elm and burr elm, pine, fruitwood, burr ash, mahogany and maple.
Away from France, Swedish painted examples turn up in nine titles, with Danish and Scandinavian painted pine alongside them. Four Italian painted pieces appear, and single Spanish and English ones. Titles also use "buffet", "dresser base" and "sideboard" for the same object, so the heading gathers several names for one long low cupboard.
Where The Range Widens
Size does much of the work. "Large", "Huge" and "Long" sit in the upper half of the range, including a French walnut and oak piece at nine foot, the only length ever stated in a title. A small oak enfilade sits low. Narrow depth pulls the same way, recurring on French and Italian painted examples through the upper-middle range, since a shallow run of doors fits a room a deep one won't.
Timber and surface separate the rest. Burr ash and burr elm, and cherrywood combined with burr ash, cluster at the upper end, while plain oak, pine and chestnut fill the lower half. Three titles specify "Original Painted", French and Spanish, and those sit above the run of plainly titled painted pieces. Carving, panelling, glazing and architectural framing all appear above the middle.
The top of the range isn't French provincial at all. The highest-priced identifiable pieces are Art Deco sideboards dated 1940 and attributed in their titles to named designers, with an outsize Louis XV style side cabinet nearby. They sit in this category by form rather than by tradition.
Retail Price Guide 2026
Typical UK retail prices for enfilades 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.
Paint just edges out bare timber in the Sellingantiques archive: 46 titles painted against 41 in oak, with bleached oak on 15 of those.
The Antique Enfilades between £0 and £0 Glossary
- Enfilade
- A long low cupboard with its doors in a single row and no upper stage. The word describes the arrangement rather than any one country's furniture.
- Buffet
- The French term for the same low dining cupboard, used interchangeably with enfilade in titles across the archive.
- Dresser base
- The lower half of a dresser standing on its own; when it does, it's often titled and sold as an enfilade.
- Bleached oak
- Oak lightened in colour. The exact phrase appears in 15 titles, making it the commonest treatment of oak in the category.
- Limed
- Oak with white filler worked into the grain, leaving the pores pale against the wood. One example carries the term.
- Buffet de chasse
- A hunting buffet. One three-door enfilade is described as cut down from a built-in 18th-century one, and nothing else shares that history.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many doors does an enfilade have?
Where the door count is stated at all, it's three or four, written as "Three Door", "3 Door" or "4 door". Many titles skip it.
The doors are panelled and run in one line under a single top. That row is what the name refers to.
Are enfilades always French?
Not always, but usually. "French" appears in 94 of 146 titles, which makes it the most consistently stated fact in the category.
Swedish painted examples account for nine titles, with Danish and Scandinavian painted pine alongside. Four Italian painted pieces appear, plus one Spanish and one English.
What timbers were used?
At least nine are named across the archive: oak, cherry, walnut, chestnut, elm and burr elm, pine, fruitwood, burr ash, mahogany and maple.
Oak leads the bare timbers with 41 titles. Walnut follows at 11. The burr woods and cherry combinations tend to sit at the upper end of the range.
Painted or bare wood, which is commoner?
Paint, just. It appears in 46 titles against 41 for oak, with "french painted" alone accounting for 19.
Only three titles specify "Original Painted", so the word painted on its own says the surface is there, not when it was applied.
Do enfilades come as pairs?
Almost never. They arrive singly.
One pair of Swedish painted enfilades appears in the whole archive of 146 listings.
How old are most enfilades on the market?
The dated field runs from 1750 to 1940, but the big block is 19th century, on 69 listings. Sixteen carry 18th century.
Where decades are given they cluster mid to late 19th century, with the 1860s, 1890s and 1880s leading. A short 20th-century tail runs into the 1930s and 1940s.