10 Ugly Old Vases That Are Secretly Worth A Fortune (You Might Own One)

What if the ugliest vase in your house is quietly worth more than your car? The dull brown one on the top shelf, the flowery one you keep meaning to donate. One of them might be $100 and one might be six figures. Ten vases have done exactly that. Pulled from cabinets, estate sales and thrift store shelves. And the most valuable is not the rarest. It is the one you are most likely to already own. And we will get there. So let us find out if it is on your shelf tonight. Here is the thing almost nobody understands about vases. Appearance has almost nothing to do with value. A piece can look dated, muddy, chipped and cheap and still be the single most valuable object in the room. While the shiny one you display proudly is worth $11. The value hides in small specific signals. A mark pressed into the base. The way a glaze catches the light. A ridge you can feel under your thumb. And if you have walked past yours for 20 years without turning it over, that is not carelessness. It is familiarity. When an object has sat in the same spot your whole life, your eye stops seeing it. It becomes furniture. Tonight we fix that. Ten vases, each with one thing you can check in your own hands, counting down to the one you are most likely to own. Number 10. The swung vase, that tall, twisting, stretched out glass vase, usually orange or dark red, that stood on a thousand grandmother's windowsills. It looks like a gas station giveaway and plenty of them were. But look at the ones nobody threw out. Fenton and Viking swung vases trade from $45 up past $1,000. A 21 and a half inch carnival example sold for $1,075. So take yours to a window and tilt it in the light. If the surface throws a shifting oil on water rainbow, but iridescent carnival finish, you are holding the collectible end, not the giveaway end. Then stand a tape measure beside it because height is money here. The tall ones are the rare ones. Most of these get chipped in a move and swept straight into the donation box. The dollar store version of a piece worth a thousand. Number nine. Cameo glass, those layered vases carved with flowers and dragonflies, one color cut through another. To a modern eye, they read as fussy, dark, a little funereal. Fair enough. Except the fussy ones are the fortune. A single Emile Gallet cameo vase, the one called Rose de France, sold at Sotheby's in 2004 for $1.2 million. So turn yours over and hunt for a signature carved right into the glass. Gallet signed his cameo work inside the design itself. Here is the tell almost everyone misses. If a small star sits beside the name, that star means the piece was made after 1904 and it dates the bars for you on the spot. The plain machine reproductions get dumped for $10 at a yard sale. Real cameo glass cut by hand through three layers quietly changes lives. Number eight. Weller pottery. Weller made oceans of plain, brownish, forgettable flower pots, and most of what carries that name is worth very little. I will not pretend otherwise. But one Weller line is a different animal. The Cicado line, iridescent, metallic, glowing purple and gold, was developed by a French artist named Jacques Cicard. Large decorated Cicado vases bring $10,000 to $20,000 and more. So carry yours to a lamp and rotate it slowly. Cicado has a deep metallic shimmer like oil on bronze with faint designs that seem to float just under the surface. A flat, matte, single color glaze is the common Weller. The shimmer is the money. I have watched a family price a Cicado bars at $3 because it looked tarnished. The tarnish was the whole point. Number seven. Moorcroft English art pottery. Thick raised outlines, heavy dark flowers on deep blue and green. It looks like something from a dim front parlor and plenty of it is ordinary. Here is the part that separates ordinary from extraordinary. Everyday Moorcroft runs around £100 but rare early pieces by William Moorcroft himself sell for £10,000 to £17,000. So run your thumb across the flowers. Real Moorcroft is tube lined. Every outline is a raised ridge of piped clay. You can feel like icing on a cake. Never printed flat. Then check the base for an impressed signature and a painted initial. Hand piped ridges plus an early mark is the combination that pays. The plain later pots fetch a few pounds at a car boot sale. The early hand tubed ones quietly clear five figures. Number six. Iridescent art glass, gold and blue vases with a surface like a peacock feather or an oil slick. When that shine goes dull under years of dust, people assume it is cheap costume glass. Now the part the dealers keep quiet. Tiffany Favriel vases run $10,000 to $100,000 and the record set at Christie's in 2016 was $593,000. So turn it over and read the base. Genuine Tiffany is signed on the polished pontil, the smooth ground spot underneath with LCT or LC Tiffany Favriel. But I owe you the hard truth on this one. Condition is everything. A Favriel vase worth $3,000 or $4,000 in perfect shape drops to $500 or $800 with a single chip and a hidden crack can take it to almost nothing. And people scrub that iridescence off with cleaner thinking they are polishing it. That surface is the value and it never comes back. But before we count down the final five, there is something almost nobody realises about vases like these. The value is almost never in how a piece looks across a room. It is in a handful of small specific signals. The mark pressed into the base. The way a glaze holds the light. The ridge of a hand-piped line. The ground pontil under the foot. The things a dealer reads in 10 seconds and most owners never think to flip the piece over to find. And those signals are learnable. I spent a long time gathering the ones that actually move a price into one plain guide, the appraiser's playbook. So you can read the bottom of a vase the way the trade does before you ever slide it across a table for someone else's number. It walks through the marks that matter, the glazes worth real money and the fakes dressed up to fool you. If that would help you, the link is in the description below. Now back to the countdown. Now the mood shifts because the last four come with a warning. Number five. Blue and white Chinese porcelain. The classic jars and vases in half the China cabinets in America. Most people assume theirs is a gift shop copy and most people are right, which is exactly why the real ones slip through. A Ming Dynasty porcelain vase sold at Sotheby's in 2014 for 21.6 million dollars. But here is the trap. The rain mark on the base, that little column of characters, is the single most faked element on Chinese porcelain. A mark alone proves nothing. The value lives in the body, the glaze and the painting, never in the signature. On Antiques Roadshow, appraisers valued old Chinese vases bought in full of hope at 20 to 40 dollars a piece. So most of these are worth a dinner out and I will not tell you otherwise. But a genuine, one, unrecognized, quietly leaves a family for pennies. Number four. The reticulated vase. A Chinese vase with an openwork outer shell, pierced like lace, often in loud greens and pinks. It looks overworked, almost gaudy, the kind of thing shoved to the back of the shelf. But the fussiest of these are imperial. One reticulated Qianlong vase sold at Sotheby's in 1954 for 44 pounds, about 56 dollars. The same vase came back to Sotheby's Hong Kong in 2020 and made just over 9 million dollars. Another, bought by a British surgeon for a few hundred pounds in the 1980s, later sold for 1.9 million. And for the jade and hard stone pieces in this family, one honest test still holds. Press a steel blade against a hidden spot. Real jade is harder than steel and will not scratch. If the tool leaves a mark, you are holding soft stone dressed up as treasure. 44 pounds, then 9 million. Nothing about the object changed, only who was looking. And still, the vase most likely to be in your own house is two spots away and somebody bought it for under four dollars. Number three. In 2010, a man named Tony Johnson and his aunt Jean were clearing out a late relative's ordinary house in Pinner in northwest London. On top of a wobbly bookcase sat a 16 inch Chinese vase nobody had thought about in years. What happened next is why we are all here. At a small auction house called Bainbridges on the 11th of November 2010, that vase hammered at 43 million pounds with fees 53 million. On paper, one of the most valuable vases ever sold. But I promised you the truth. So here it is. The winning bidder never actually paid. The vase was quietly sold again privately about two years later for a believed 25 million. The number that circled the globe was never really banked. Even the fairy tales are messier than the headline. If you have an imperial looking Chinese vase, the tell is the quality of the enamel and the pierced work, not the mark. But get it in front of an expert before you let yourself dream. From a dead woman's bookcase to a world record and the family nearly carried it to the tip with the rest of the clutter. Number two. A slim glass vase, 13 and a half inches tall, brushed with loose stripes of color. Jessica Vincent found it on a shelf at a Goodwill in Virginia. Here is the moment that should stay with you. In her own words, when we got to the checkout, it was $3.99. I had been prepared to pay eight or nine dollars for it. So I was super excited at the price. That vase was a 1940s piece by the architect Carlo Scarpa made for Venini, the great Murano glass house. At Wright Auction House in December 2023, it sold for $107,100 against an estimate of $30,000 to $50,000. A glass collectors group had offered her $10,000 before the sale. She said no. So look for loose, paintly bands of color fused into clear glass. The Penolate or brushstroke series. The expert who authenticated it called it one of the rarest pieces they had offered in more than a decade. $3.99 to $107,000. The only thing standing between those two numbers was knowing what to look for. Number one. Number one is not a single maker. It is the one habit that would have caught every vase on this list. And it is the vase most likely to be sitting in your house right now. American art pottery. The plain, heavy, matte-glazed vases in muddy brown and dusty green that sit in nearly every estate in this country. Rookwood, Roseville, Weller, McCoy. They look like the very definition of dated. The first thing the children box up for the thrift store. But turn one over and the base tells you everything. Top Rookwood vases, especially the ones decorated by artists like Katara Shiria Madani, bring $20,000 to well over $100,000. So here is the habit I want you to keep for the rest of your life. Before you clear out a single shelf, turn every vase upside down and read the bottom. Rookwood carries an impressed flame mark, the letters R and P set back to back, pressed into the clay, never painted on. And the flames around it count off the year. Roseville shows a raised Roseville USA script you can feel with your thumb. McCoy has its overlapping letters. Feel for marks that are pressed or raised, not printed, because printed marks are where the fakes live. And even then, a mark can lie. It is the most copied thing on any vase. So the mark starts the conversation. It never ends it. Every piece we counted down tonight, the Cameo glass, the Ciccardo Shimmer, the Tiffany Pontil, the thrift store Murano, was really the same lesson wearing a different dress. The value was never in how the vase looked across the room. It was in the small, quiet signal you only find when you pick it up and turn it over. In 20 years around estate tables, the single most expensive mistake I have watched over and over is a good vase walking out the door because nobody thought to look at its base. So before you drop a single vase in a donation box, before you take a dealer's first number, before you let anyone tell you it is only clutter, turn it over and read the bottom yourself. The ugliest vase in the house is the one that has earned a second look because value hides under the foot, not out on the shelf. If even one vase in this video is sitting in your cabinet right now, do me a small favour and tap the like button. It helps me get this in front of the people who actually own these pieces. And subscribe if you want to walk into every estate sale and every family clean out already knowing more than the person across the table. Then tell me in the comments, which base in your house are you going to go turn over tonight? And who did it come from? A mother, a grandmother, an aunt? I read every single one. Do not let it leave the house before you check the base.