When considering places to purchase vintage furniture, thrift stores or consignment shops might come to mind. It’s common to find hidden treasures at Goodwill that can enhance your space, like aged ceramics or charming antique dinnerware. Popular platforms such as eBay and Etsy are also renowned for offering unique vintage pieces. If you consider yourself a seasoned antiquer, you might focus on valuable items at estate sales. However, you might not think of movie studio sets as a place to find antique pieces — yet they can offer a unique and unconventional way to expand your vintage collection.
In the film industry, set decorators are tasked with choosing the furniture and decor featured in movies, TV shows, and on stage. The stunning scenes in productions like “Bridgerton” and Wes Anderson’s “The Grand Budapest Hotel”? Credit goes to the skilled set designers who meticulously source the perfect blend of furniture to transport audiences back in time, from scouring flea markets, estate sales, and antique shops to recreating the opulent Regency era in England, to exploring prop houses to assemble the beautiful 1930s-style Zubrowka Hotel. But you don’t have to spend countless hours like set designers to decorate films such as “The Grand Budapest Hotel” — you can acquire some exquisite furniture directly from iconic films by visiting auction houses and movie prop websites.
How to buy antique furniture from movie sets
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Whether you’re a film design enthusiast or a passionate antiquer, there are numerous ways to acquire vintage pieces from movie sets. Online marketplaces like 1stDibs and Heritage Auctions, for instance, offer a variety of used movie set furniture at fixed prices or through auction-style bids. To decorate your home and impress guests with your piece’s star-studded history, you can also visit It’s A Wrap Hollywood’s retail store in Burbank, California, for unique vintage finds. The warehouse is one-of-a-kind, providing shoppers a unique opportunity to purchase items from film and television productions.
On Instagram, content creator @makeitmdrn found success on Facebook Marketplace, securing a beautiful burled wood desk they plan to transform into a bar. What seemed like an unusual listing (the seller required an ID for pickup) at a suspicious warehouse in Hollywood turned out to be a movie set. While finding pieces this way may be rare, you can try your luck by joining a local Facebook film group to search for antique items used in film and TV sets. Reaching out to production companies directly can also provide guidance on where to purchase items post-production, although this method may require more persistence due to the busy and often hard-to-reach nature of production companies.
