Has Furniture Flipping on TikTok Gone Too Far? Experts Weigh In

Take one look at content filed under TikTok’s #furnitureflip or similar hashtags, and you’ll encounter thousands of similar videos, with just as many enraged onlookers. Content creators are sourcing antiques—sometimes pricey ones and sometimes affordable steals courtesy of Facebook Marketplace—and completely redoing them, either for their own enjoyment or to resell post-flip.

Disapproving comments have been so pervasive on upcycling clips that furniture flippers have started to performatively embrace the hate—to the point of beginning their videos’ voice-overs with cheeky yet incendiary phrases like “come with me to ruin this buffet.”

Our Houston Smith Home—the account behind the nightstand debacle—eventually clarified that the wood desk was already in poor condition when it was given to her, and she was able to breathe new life into it by selling the resulting nightstands as a bedroom set. But the backlash, nonetheless, gave her pause.

“I learned that a lot of people on the internet don’t like you messing with ‘perfect vintage wood pieces,’ ” she wrote on Instagram last December. “I’ll just say this…if you don’t have anything nice to say then don’t say anything at all.”

Proponents of FlipTok are quick to argue that flipping antiques is an innocent pursuit and completely justifiable if it makes the DIYer in question happy.

DIY upcycling or furniture “hacks” are hardly new concepts. Painted furniture in the United States, after all, experienced a heyday in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. When Mennonites from Eastern Europe immigrated to the country, they started to decorate everything from wardrobes to chests to chairs with floral motifs and beyond. During the Victorian era, too, furniture was upcycled by cobbling together influences ranging from rococo to Gothic. Even in the times of ancient Egypt, commoners painted wood furniture to make it look more expensive.

In recent years, though, DIY furniture has been aligning more with a dated mid-aughts Etsy aesthetic than it has with expensive-looking design. “The word upcycling has, for a long time, put the fear of God into a lot of people,” explains Adam Hills of the ELLE DECOR A-List studio Retrouvius, known for its considered use of salvaged furniture and materials. “It became a byword for painting everything and anything in pretty artless, trashy pop colors.” He specifically cites a penchant for the kind of bubblegum colors popularized by filmmaker Wes Anderson.

The London-based ELLE DECOR A-List firm Retrouvius has an ethos of giving salvaged, reclaimed, and vintage materials second chances.

On TikTok, furniture flips can often feel especially arbitrary and directionless, inviting the question of whether DIYers are taking drastic aesthetic liberties for the sake of going viral, i.e., rage baiting. Granted, many FlipTok proponents—including social-media users who come to the defense of content creators getting bashed in their own comment sections—would be quick to object, saying that it’s never a bad idea to do what makes you happy. If this happens to include painting a 19th-century chest of drawers in an off-white shade, well, why not?

Denver-based antiques dealer and TikToker Anna Kinsel, who runs a business called Chic Antiques, has mixed feelings. As she sees it, chalk-painting and spray-painting are some of the most clichéd ways to modify original furniture. In a post from February, Kinsel overlaid a video of a crying Margot Robbie as Barbie on a photo of an antique cabinet, painted in a mint green hue. “Shabby Chic Farmhouse needs to be left in 2023,” she responded to a user’s comment that vocalized a similar sentiment. Still, Kinsel is willing to be somewhat open-minded: “At the end of the day, everyone has a different opinion. For some people, when they paint that mahogany dresser hot pink, that’s what brings them joy. That’s how they hold those antique pieces near and dear to their heart and give them new life.”

Anna Kinsel urges her followers and clients to preserve the rarity and value of antiques by abstaining from modifying them in any way.

Katja Hirshe is the owner of Bernd Goeckler, an antiques and collectible design shop in New York City’s East Village, where Louis XVI and neoclassical furnishings find themselves right at home alongside contemporary art pieces. She finds nothing wrong with having a little fun and putting personal touches on antiques, as long as you don’t actually do it yourself. “I’ve been in this business for 26 years now,” Hirshe tells ELLE DECOR. “We were always asked if you should restore a finish or not. I think it depends on your taste. Will it ruin the value? Not if you do it professionally.”

If anything, Hirshe is hopeful that the hype this trend is generating will encourage young people to develop a more antiques-oriented mindset when it comes to furniture acquisition, or at least to be less wasteful where buying habits are concerned.

“The general public looks for replaceable things because they change their mind every two years and need to redecorate,” she says. “Nobody can sustain that kind of Energizer Bunny energy. I think that in the next 10 years or so, there will be a slowing down of sorts. The curated mind will [prevail].”

Want to Upcycle Your Own Furniture? Here’s How to Do It the Right Way

Verify Value

It’s hard to pinpoint the exact price of antiques with an untrained eye, but certain steps can, indeed, be taken to determine if it’s ok to take a belt sander to that vintage dresser. “Do your own research: Google reverse-image search can at least put you on the right track,” says David Trujillo, head of sale at Bonhams’s modern decorative art and design department in Los Angeles. “If you think that something has value, before you do anything with it feel free to reach out to an auction house.” He mentions that most, like Bonhams, provide complimentary estimates.

Start Small

If you’re still undeterred from a bit of personal upcycling, just remember to go the low-stakes route—at least at the beginning. “If it’s your first project, start on something that isn’t precious, something that’s low-value, and just see how you get on,” Hills urges. “Don’t start on your grandmother’s heirloom.”

Don’t (Always) Get Precious with the Old Stuff

PSA: Age isn’t always synonymous with value. “We get people coming in and saying, ‘This has been in my family for 150 years, it must have some type of value.’ That’s not necessarily the case,” Trujillo says. Still, think twice before you whip out that can of spray paint.

Stacia Datskovska, Assistant Digital Editor at ELLE DECOR, covers design, decor, and architecture—with an eye towards trends and culture at large. She has previously written for USA Today, the Boston Globe, Teen Vogue, Apartment Therapy, and more.