Antique Mahogany Wardrobes between £0 and £0
A full-height mahogany clothes cupboard, made to hang and store tailored garments, from a narrow single-door case to a four-door breakfront range.
What You're Looking At
Most likely a late Victorian or Edwardian two- or three-door wardrobe in mahogany, with mirrored or panelled doors and a hanging rail behind them. Victorian appears in 427 titles and Edwardian in 331; triple and double door counts together far outnumber single and four-door pieces. Around one in seven titles carries the date c1900.
Free-standing clothes cupboards took over from the chest and the press as tailored clothing spread, and mahogany became the standard timber for them in Britain from the eighteenth century on. Dealers usually just say mahogany, sometimes qualifying it as flame, figured, plum pudding, Cuban or Spanish.
The heading gathers in several related forms. Compactums and combination wardrobes, roughly one in eight, put drawers, sliding trays and hanging space in a single case, a late nineteenth and early twentieth-century bedroom arrangement. Linen presses and clothes presses account for about a twelfth, French armoires for a smaller slice again, and Georgian, Regency and William IV wardrobes for around one in ten.
Dating on Sellingantiques runs from 1760 to 1930, but only 370 of 1,346 listings carry a clean year. The rest sit under looser labels: 19th Century, Victorian, Edwardian, or a circa date in the title. Treat the dated field as an indication rather than a document, since it sometimes disagrees with the title.
Where The Range Splits
Timber figure does more work than anything else. Flame, figured and flamed mahogany are named in well over a hundred titles between them, and the entries that reach for plum pudding, Cuban or Spanish mahogany sit high in the range. A wardrobe described only as mahogany is usually a plainer piece of veneer.
Shape and scale follow. Breakfront fronts appear in 127 titles and four-door examples in 35, and those cluster at the upper end, particularly the George III to William IV breakfront four-door ranges. Plain two-door wardrobes make up the bulk of the lower end. Bow and serpentine fronts sit between the two.
Then decoration and name. Inlay is the commonest decorative note at 188 titles, and the higher entries specify marquetry, satinwood, boxwood or brass. Maker names show up almost only above the middle, attributions higher still, and early date lifts a piece the way a 1920s or 1930s solid mahogany wardrobe does not.
Retail Price Guide 2026
Typical UK retail prices for mahogany wardrobes 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 George III flame mahogany breakfront secretaire wardrobe of about 1780, sold in February 2026.
Maple & Co·Gillows of Lancaster
The Antique Mahogany Wardrobes between £0 and £0 Glossary
- Compactum
- A wardrobe fitted internally with drawers, sliding trays and hanging space in one case. It runs to 115 titles, spelled compactom and compactium as well.
- Triple, double, single
- Door count, and so width. Triple leads at 252 titles, double follows at 173, single trails at 57. Note that double is misspelled doubke in 17 titles.
- Breakfront
- A centre section standing forward of the flanking sections, in 127 titles and often paired with a triple front.
- Bow front
- A convex curved front. Serpentine means a front shaped in a wave rather than one simple curve, and turns up repeatedly in titles.
- Linen press
- A cupboard over a chest base with sliding trays for folded linen, in 91 titles. Some have dummy drawer fronts concealing the press interior.
- Sentry box
- A tall narrow single-door wardrobe. Seventeen titles use it, spelled at least four ways including centry and sebtry.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a compactum wardrobe?
It's a wardrobe fitted out inside with drawers and sliding trays beside the hanging space, often with a mirror, all in one case. The arrangement belongs to the later nineteenth and early twentieth-century bedroom.
Compactum appears in 115 titles, and combination in another 51. Together with fitted wardrobes they make up roughly one in eight of the category.
How old are most mahogany wardrobes for sale?
Victorian and Edwardian between them account for the majority. The dated field records 343 Victorian and 300 Edwardian, with a further 164 logged only as 19th Century.
Georgian and Regency pieces are real but a minority, around one in ten of the listings. The full span on Sellingantiques runs from 1760 to 1930.
Why are linen presses listed under wardrobes?
Because they do the same job in the same room. A linen press is a cupboard over a chest base, with sliding trays inside for folded linen rather than a rail for hanging.
Press appears in 110 titles and linen press in 91, and dealers often pair the two words in one title, as Linen Press/Wardrobe.
What does breakfront mean on a wardrobe?
The centre section projects forward of the sections either side, giving the front a stepped profile rather than one flat plane.
It shows up in 127 titles and pairs with triple in 31 of them. Breakfront examples, especially the four-door ones, sit at the upper end of the range.
Are French armoires included in this category?
Yes, though they're a small part of it. French appears in 41 titles and armoire in 37, usually together.
Sampled entries include Louis XVI, Louis Philippe and Empire forms, some with ormolu mounts or brass inlay.
Which mahogany wardrobes are hardest to find?
Corner wardrobes are a rarity in the archive, and one sampled entry is a pair of them. Wardrobes are offered in pairs now and then.
Campaign, knockdown, secretaire and turret wardrobes each surface only once or twice across the whole sample. Channel Islands wardrobes turn up as a regional oddity, described that way in a handful of entries spanning the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.