Antique workbenches are popular with interior designers who buy them up to use as rustic accent pieces or functional pieces like hallway tables, computer desks and bars. We recently saw these classics at an antique festival in Round Top, Texas where they were selling for $1,000 and up. My father-in-law Terry and I built our own Swedish woodworking benches 25 years ago, his was solid oak, mine was maple. We took a bench-building class together and followed the plans to the letter. The results were massive, sturdy pieces that if thrown off the back of a moving truck they would most likely tumble a few times and land upright without a scratch. I’ll have my bench forever, no doubt, but my current shop space can’t handle its size. Rather than putting it in storage, my wife confiscated it to use as a desk in her home office. “Best desk ever,” she says.
Turn-of-the-century Swedish workbenches. One in a series of 11 educational posters distributed by Gleerup’s University Bookshop, Lund, Sweden.
An illustration of a late-1700s German cabinetmaker’s bench and an ad for a 1920s mass-produced workbench selling for $22.50. From The Workbench Book by Scott Landis, 1987, Taunton Press, Inc.