Antique Settles between £0 and £0
A settle is a long wooden seat with a back, built as joinery for two or more people, made to keep the draught off beside a hearth or in an entrance passage.
What Is A Settle?
A settle is a long seat with a solid back, usually panelled, often with arms or wings, put together as a piece of joinery rather than an upholstered frame. Many were built with a hinged or lift-up box seat, so the same piece gave both seating and storage. The back-and-arm form developed in northern European joinery well before upholstered furniture was common.
Half the settles on Sellingantiques are oak, and the version you're most likely to meet is an English oak one dated Georgian or 18th century. Panelled backs counted in the title as four-panel or five-panel, box seats, squab cushions and high backs are the descriptions that repeat through that group. Pine, mahogany, fruitwood, walnut, cherry and rosewood make up the rest of the timbers.
Around that core sit several smaller groups. Country pine and painted settles, some with storage under the seat, turn up as tavern, chapel and farmhouse pieces. Swedish and Continental painted seats appear in ones and twos, with French, Austrian, Bavarian, Italian and Provencal examples among them. Upholstered hall settles and settle-sofas form another strand, wing back and button back among them, and Arts and Crafts and later revival settles a smaller one.
Dating is loose. The dated field runs from 1750 to 1950, but only 42 of 129 listings commit to a clean year and the rest give an era label. Georgian and 18th century overlap heavily and describe much the same population. One entry dated 1950 calls itself 18th century style in its own title, so a date field isn't always a date of manufacture. The naming is fluid too: settle, bench, hall seat, window seat, couch and sofa all appear, sometimes three of them in one listing.
Where The Range Sits
Age does most of the work at the top. Seventeenth-century dating is the rarest label in the archive, on five listings, and those pieces along with the earliest 18th-century ones sit high in the sampled range, including a late 17th century carved oak settle and a 17th century wingback. Carving pushes the same way: carved oak, carved walnut and carved pine examples cluster in the upper part of the range.
Surface counts. Original paint recurs on Swedish, Austrian and English settles placed high up, and painted pieces generally hold their position. Size follows: long, good sized and three-seater descriptions attach to the more expensive sampled settles, where a short two-seater does not. A named school or a regional attribution, Glasgow School, Cotswold School, Aesthetic Movement or High Wycombe, shows up only on higher-placed listings.
The bottom of the range is plainer and later. Small undecorated oak settles, box-seat upholstered wing backs and Edwardian hall seats take up the cheapest sampled entries. Nothing wrong with them as furniture, but they carry neither the early joinery nor the decoration that lifts the rest.
Retail Price Guide 2026
Typical UK retail prices for settles 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.
About ten settles are listed on Sellingantiques each year, and 56 different dealers have listed one.
The Antique Settles between £0 and £0 Glossary
- Settle
- A long wooden seat with a back for two or more, made as joinery rather than an upholstered frame.
- Box seat
- A seat with a hinged or lift-out lid over a storage compartment beneath.
- Panelled back
- A back built of framed panels; titles often count them, as in four-panel or five-panel.
- Squab seat
- A loose stuffed cushion pad sitting on the wooden seat.
- High back
- An unusually tall back, originally to block draughts, with wings being side panels projecting forward to shelter the sitter.
- Coachman's settle
- A type named in titles, sometimes double-ended; alehouse and tavern settle are trade terms for plain, hard-used public-house seating.
Frequently Asked Questions
What wood are settles usually made from?
Oak is the default. It appears in half of all titles on Sellingantiques, generally with panelled backs and box or squab seats.
The rest run to pine, mahogany, walnut, fruitwood, cherry, birch, rosewood and bleached oak. Pine turns up on country and painted examples, mahogany on the upholstered hall settles.
How old are most antique settles?
Georgian and 18th century are the two commonest labels, and they describe much the same group of pieces seen two ways. Nineteenth century is the next block, with 1880s, 1890s, 1870s and 1800s the only decade-level detail.
Seventeenth-century dating is the rarest, on five listings. The 1900s account for a further group, and a single piece is dated 1950.
Why are settles also called benches or hall seats?
The terminology is fluid across the category. Bench appears in around a fifth of titles, sofa and hall in roughly a tenth each, and window seat and couch turn up as well.
Sometimes three of those words appear in one listing for the same object. Hall seat tends to mean a shorter, more decorative settle made for an entrance.
Do settles have storage under the seat?
Many do. The box seat, with a hinged or lift-out lid over a compartment, is one of the recurring descriptors in oak and pine examples alike.
Others have a plain fixed seat, sometimes with a squab cushion laid on top.
Are Continental settles common on Sellingantiques?
They arrive in ones and twos. Swedish examples are the largest of the overseas groups, including Gustavian and Empire pieces, usually painted.
French, Austrian, Bavarian, Italian and Provencal settles all appear, along with Chinese export pieces, one of them inlaid with mother of pearl.
The top of the sampled range is held by a carved Italian pine example.
How many settles come up for sale?
Only about ten a year come to market on Sellingantiques, so the category moves slowly.
Even so, 56 different dealers have listed one. It's a form almost everybody handles occasionally and nobody stocks in depth.