Is Grandmother's China, Crystal and Silver Worth Anything?

The honest answer first

Most formal dinnerware sells for far less than the family expects, and less than it cost. A twelve-place setting of good porcelain that was a wedding present in 1962 and used four times a year will, at a typical estate sale, bring a small fraction of its replacement cost, and it may not sell at all until the last day. Stemware follows it down. Silver plate, however handsome, is worth little. The one clear exception is sterling silver, which has a floor under it set by the metal itself and always finds a buyer.

The reason is not that the pieces got worse. The people who bought formal dinnerware did so because they entertained formally, had a dining room and a china cabinet, and expected to hand it on. Households are smaller now, dishwashers are standard, gold-rimmed porcelain cannot go in one, and the generation that would have inherited the set has said no. The supply of good sets coming out of houses every week is enormous and the number of buyers who want a full formal service is small. That is the whole market, and no amount of provenance or sentiment changes it.

None of which means the cabinet is worthless. It means the value is uneven: a few kinds of piece still sell well, sterling is worth checking piece by piece, and the rest should be priced to leave the house rather than to honor what it once cost. The sections below sort the cabinet into those groups.

China: what still sells and what does not

A full set is the hardest thing in the cabinet to sell, and its parts are easier. Buyers now shop by the piece: a stack of dinner plates in a pattern they collect, a few teacups for a display, a serving bowl or platter, a gravy boat, a covered vegetable dish. Serving pieces sell better than place settings, because a set that was used broke its plates and not its tureens, so tureens are scarcer. Odd and decorative pieces, cake stands and cups and saucers sell to people who do not want a service at all.

Within that, a few things hold value better than the rest:

• Patterns people still collect. Some patterns from the well-known English, French, German and American makers have an active following, and a replacement service or the collectors' listings will show quickly whether one does. A pattern that a replacement service lists at a high price per plate is one buyers are still hunting for; a pattern listed at a few dollars is one the market is full of.
• Hand-painted and artist-signed pieces, early pieces from the well-known factories, and unusual forms.
• Everyday and mid-century dinnerware in the colorful patterns that are fashionable again, which now often out-sells the formal service in the same cabinet. Some of the melamine and stoneware a family would have thrown away sells briskly; the guide to vintage kitchenware explains why.

What does not sell: sets with chips, cracks, crazing or worn gilding; patterns discontinued because nobody bought them; and the "fine china" sets sold by mail order and department stores in the 1970s and 1980s, which were made in large numbers and still fill cabinets across the country. Condition is unforgiving. One chip takes a plate from saleable to worthless, and a buyer will turn every piece over and run a finger around every rim.

Crystal and glass

Stemware has fallen further than china. Cut crystal goblets, the sets of twelve in three sizes, sell slowly and for little, and many buyers cannot tell hand-cut lead crystal from pressed glass and will not pay for the difference. The pieces that still move are the ones that work as decoration or as a single object: a heavy cut-crystal vase, a decanter with its stopper, a punch bowl with cups, a set of colored glass, a good pitcher, and barware from the mid-century in unusual shapes. Signed pieces from the well-known crystal makers are worth checking; look for an acid-etched signature on the base, often faint and only visible when the piece is tilted against the light.

Colored and pressed glass has its own collectors, and a few categories that a family might mistake for junk (carnival glass, early art glass, certain Depression-era patterns, studio glass with a signature on the foot) sell better than the crystal beside them. The guide to finding out whether something is valuable shows how to check a signature or a pattern against sold prices in a few minutes. Chips on a rim or a foot end the conversation for most glass, just as for china.

Silver: how to tell sterling from plate

Silver is the one category where checking is always worth the time, because the two things that look identical on the sideboard are worth completely different amounts. Sterling is an alloy of at least 92.5 percent silver, and every piece is worth at least its weight in silver. Silver plate is a thin layer of silver over a base metal, usually copper or nickel silver, and has almost no metal value at all. Both are marked, and the marks are what decide it.

Look on the back of flatware near the end of the handle, and on the underside of hollowware. A magnifying glass helps, because the marks are small and often worn. If a piece has no mark at all, it is almost certainly plate; solid silver has been marked as such nearly everywhere for a very long time. A magnet is a rough second check (silver is not magnetic, and neither are some base metals, so a magnet that sticks proves plate but one that does not proves nothing), and worn plate shows a warm copper or gray tone at the high points where the silver has rubbed through. The guide to telling sterling from plate goes through each test in detail.

What sterling is worth, and when it is worth more than metal

Every piece of sterling has a floor: its weight in silver at the day's price, less the margin a refiner or dealer takes for buying it. That is the "melt" or scrap value, and it is what a dealer's offer for a drawer of mixed sterling is based on. Weigh the flatware on a kitchen scale, subtract for knife handles (which are hollow and filled with resin or cement around a steel blade, so a sterling knife has very little silver in it), and look up the day's silver price. It is a rough number, but it tells you what the floor is before anyone makes an offer.

Some sterling is worth more than melt, and it is the reason not to send everything to a refiner. Complete flatware services in patterns still in production or still collected sell by the set or by the piece for well above the metal. Pieces by the well-known American and English silversmiths, early American coin silver, hand-wrought Arts and Crafts and mid-century Scandinavian silver, and good hollowware in original condition have collectors' and dealers' markets that a refiner never sees. A monogram lowers the price to a collector and does nothing to the melt value, so a heavily engraved set may in fact be worth exactly its weight.

Silver plate, by contrast, is worth what a buyer will pay for it as an object. A handsome plated tea service, a large tray or a set of plated flatware in good condition sells for a modest sum to someone who wants the look. Worn plate, with the copper showing through, sells for very little, and replating costs more than the piece is worth. Do not let anyone weigh plate and pay by the ounce; there is nothing in it to weigh.

Pricing it at an estate sale, and how sets actually sell

An estate sale company will price china and crystal by the piece and offer a set price for the whole, and it will generally price against what a replacement service charges rather than at it, because a replacement service sells one plate to somebody who needs exactly that plate, and an estate sale is selling a hundred plates to whoever walks in. Expect the set price to be a fraction of the sum of the pieces, and expect it to drop on the last day. Sterling is priced by the piece and the pattern, with the melt value as the floor, and it is usually kept in a locked case or behind the checkout.

If you are pricing it yourself, three habits help. Look up sold prices, not asking prices, and for the same pattern and piece; a pattern's name is usually printed on the back of the plate. Price the serving pieces and the odd decorative items individually, because that is how they sell, and offer the place settings as a set with a low per-piece price if somebody wants only some. And write the pattern name on a card beside the set, because the buyers who want it are searching by pattern and will not recognize it from across the room. The guide to what sells best at estate sales puts all of this in context with the rest of the house.

The other routes: replacement services, dealers and refiners

Not everything has to go through the sale. A replacement service (a business that buys and resells discontinued china, crystal and flatware by the pattern) will buy pieces in patterns it needs, usually for a fixed price per piece, paying more for the scarce serving pieces than for dinner plates. The offer is well below what the service will resell for, the pieces must be in near-perfect condition, and the service will only want patterns on its current buying list; but it is a real route for a good set the estate sale cannot move, and it pays by check after you ship.

A silver dealer will look at sterling and make an offer above melt for pieces with a collectors' market, and a refiner will pay melt less a margin for the rest. Get the melt figure yourself first, and get two offers. An antiques dealer may want a signed piece of crystal or an early piece of porcelain outright. For a large, good collection, an auction house is a possibility, though a house full of ordinary china is not what auction houses are looking for; the guide to estate sale versus auction explains where the line falls.

Whatever is left after all of that is a donation, and the charity shops take china and glass readily. The guide to estate sale or donation covers how to do both without leaving money behind.

Keeping some of it

Grandmother's china is, for many families, the hardest thing in the house to sell, and not for the money. It was on the table at every Thanksgiving anyone can remember. It is worth saying plainly that a low price is not a reason to keep a set nobody will use, and it is not a reason to feel that the set has somehow failed. The market for formal dinnerware has changed; the dinners did not.

A practical middle path is to keep the pieces that carry the memory and use them: a platter, a gravy boat, the cups, four place settings instead of twelve. Those go in the cabinet in somebody's house and come out on the day, and the rest of the set goes to a buyer who wants it. If several people in the family want the same set, the guide to dividing personal property among siblings has ways of settling that fairly, and the guide to what to keep is about the larger question of which things to hold onto and which to let go.

What to do next

Sort the cabinet into three groups: anything marked sterling or with a purity number, which you weigh and check by maker; the serving pieces, signed glass and collectible patterns, which you price individually; and the rest of the set, which is priced to leave the house. Decide what the family keeps before the sale, not during it.

When you are ready to hear from companies near you, describe the estate once and local companies will reach out to you, free. A good company will price the cabinet honestly and will know a dealer for the sterling.

Frequently asked questions