The Genius Place You Never Thought To Buy Vintage Furniture

When you think of places to buy vintage furniture, you probably think of thrift stores or consignment shops. It's not unusual to score hidden gems at Goodwill that'll elevate your space, like aged ceramics or charming antique dinnerware. Popular marketplaces such as eBay and Etsy are also well-known for offering unique vintage pieces. If you consider yourself more of an advanced antiquer, you might have found yourself zeroing in on valuable things to look out for at estate sales. You might not, however, consider movie studio sets to be somewhere you can score antique pieces — yet they can be a unique, albeit unconventional, way to broaden your vintage collection.

In the film industry, set decorators are responsible for choosing the furniture and decor you see in movies, TV shows, and on the stage. The beautiful scenes in productions like "Bridgerton" and Wes Anderson's "The Grand Budapest Hotel"? You can thank the talented teams of set designers who source the perfect mix of furniture to transport audiences to a time long ago, from combing through flea markets, estate sales, and antique shops to recreate the sumptuous Regency era in England, to searching prop houses to curate the gorgeous 1930s-style Zubrowka Hotel. But you don't have to spend the countless hours that set designers do to decorate movies like "The Grand Budapest Hotel" — you can snag some gorgeous furniture directly from iconic films by visiting auction houses and movie prop websites.

Whether you're a film design enthusiast or a passionate antiquer, there are many ways to acquire vintage pieces from movie sets. Online marketplaces like 1stDibs and Heritage Auctions, for example, offer an array of used movie set furniture at fixed prices or 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, offering shoppers a unique opportunity to purchase items from film and television productions. 

Over on Instagram, content creator @makeitmdrn had a stroke of luck on Facebook Marketplace to score a gorgeous burled wood desk that they plan to transform into a bar. What they thought was an odd listing (the seller required an ID for pick up) at a suspicious warehouse in Hollywood turned out to be a movie set. While it's rare to find pieces this way, you can test your luck by joining a local Facebook film group to hunt for antique items used in film and TV sets. Reaching out to production companies directly can also give you pointers on where to purchase items post-production, though it might take more persistence to acquire furniture this way, given how busy and hard-to-reach production companies can be.