Categories
A well-run sale clears the whole household, not just the good pieces. But it is worth knowing where value tends to concentrate here, and where mainland price guides will lead you wrong in both directions.
Solid-wood case pieces, dining sets, bedroom sets, mid-century pieces, Asian furniture, rattan and lanai furniture, desks and bookcases, and the ordinary everyday furniture that fills a house and still sells.
Sells strongly: well-built solid wood, mid-century, teak and rattan, anything compact. Sells slowly: large formal brown-wood suites, entertainment units, and bulky items cheap to replace new.
Complete dinner services, crystal and barware, Japanese and Chinese ceramics, cast iron and cookware, small appliances, silver and silver plate, table linens, and the full contents of every cabinet and drawer.
Completeness matters more than people expect. A full service of twelve is a materially different item from a partial set, which is one reason we ask you not to break things up before a walkthrough.
Fine jewelry, costume jewelry, watches, coins and currency, pens, lighters, compacts and the contents of a dresser top.
Costume jewelry is the category families discard most often and regret most reliably. Mid-century costume pieces and signed designer costume jewelry can outperform modest gold. These items are held in a supervised case during the sale rather than left on an open table.
Original paintings and prints, framed works, mirrors, lamps and lighting, clocks, sculpture, vases, and the decorative objects that accumulate across decades in a house.
Art is where an incorrect assumption is most expensive in both directions: families discard signed work as "just a print" and hold on to reproductions as heirlooms. Anything with a signature, a gallery label or a frame worth more than the picture is researched individually.
Koa bowls and furniture, Hawaiian quilts, ukulele, surfboards and longboards, vintage aloha shirts, Niʻihau shell lei, hula implements, island prints, menus, postcards and ephemera.
Local demand for this category is genuinely different from mainland comparables, and national price guides get it wrong routinely. It is one of the clearest reasons to have an Oʻahu estate priced by someone who works on Oʻahu.
Books, maps, photographs, letters, documents, sheet music, records, and the paperwork that accumulates in desks and filing drawers.
Hawaii-related paper (plantation-era documents, island photography, early tourism material, local publications) is a real collecting field, and it is very frequently the last thing anyone thinks to look at before a skip is ordered.
Asian antiques
Hawaii's demographic history means Japanese, Chinese and Okinawan pieces appear in ordinary estates here at a rate that has no mainland equivalent: brought by families over generations, and often never thought of as collectible by the households holding them.
Imari and Satsuma, celadon and blue-and-white, tansu and other case furniture, netsuke and small carvings, scrolls and screens, tea ware, cloisonné, jade and hardstone, obi and textiles, and Okinawan pottery.
The range within any of these categories is enormous: a mass-market twentieth-century piece and a serious one can look similar to an untrained eye, and the difference between them is not small. Guessing in either direction is costly.
Identified during preparation and researched individually rather than bundled into a general household price. Where a piece genuinely warrants a specialist's opinion before it is priced, we will tell you that instead of estimating.
These rarely produce a single headline item, but across a full household they frequently add up to more than the antiques do, and they are the categories most often thrown away before anyone looks:
Some categories carry legal, licensing or safety obligations, or need a different channel entirely:
Where an item cannot be sold at the sale, that does not mean it has no value: it means it needs the right route. The exclusions that apply to your estate are confirmed at the walkthrough and named in the written scope.
Tell us where the property is, roughly what's in it, and the date you're working toward. We'll come look, tell you what the estate is realistically likely to do, and put the scope and the rate in writing before you commit to anything.
No cost for the consultation. No obligation to book a sale.