From a priceless vase that was used as an umbrella stand to a huge diamond that its owner thought was costume jewellery, you’d be amazed at the valuable items people have had under their noses for years without realising. Read on to find out about the unbelievable art, artefacts and treasure people didn’t know they owned. All dollar values in US dollars and sterling conversions correct at time of sale.

Furniture scavenger and salesman Jesse Brody was looking around a dilapidated home in Morningside, Miami when he came across a piece of furniture that caught his eye. It was a 1920s-era steel dental cabinet, which had formerly belonged to Cuban immigrant Rolando Periche Mojena, who died in 2013. Brody took it back home and put it in his warehouse, where it "sat for years" before he took a proper look at it again.

When he began to look through it, he got a big surprise. The cabinet was filled with all sorts of treasures that Mojena had tucked away before he died, including an old Cuban passport and naturalisation documents, several stacks of money amounting to a couple of thousand dollars, gold and diamond jewellery, and an American Eagle coin valued at $1,500 (£1.2k). Brody, who specialises in small metals fabrication and industrial manufacturing, estimated the haul was worth $30,000 (£23.3k) in total.

In the early 2000s, a couple from Dumfries in Scotland snapped up this glass vase for £1 at a local car boot sale simply because they liked the plant it was holding. When the plant died, the vase was packed away in the loft and pretty much consigned to oblivion.

In 2008, the BBC's Antiques Roadshow TV show came to town, and the couple remembered the glass vase they had bagged for peanuts. Not expecting it to have any value, the pair were amazed to discover the car boot sale find was actually a highly desirable object by Art Nouveau icon René Lalique. The most valuable piece of glass to appear on the series, the vase was sold later that year for £32,450, which would be equivalent to $51,600 (£42.6k) today.

Farmer David Mazurek had been using a 23-pound rock as a doorstop ever since 1988, when he bought a barn and the rock came with it. He knew it was a meteorite – his kids even took it to school for Show and Tell – but had no idea of its value. It was only when he saw reports that meteorite pieces were selling for thousands that he took it to Central Michigan University (CMU) for examination.

Mona Sirbescu, a CMU geology professor, knew as soon as she saw the meteorite that it was something special. "It's the most valuable specimen I have ever held in my life, monetarily and scientifically," Sibescu said in an interview with the university. Made of of 88.5% iron and 11.5% nickel, the 22-pound rock has an estimated value of $100,000 (£85k).

Standing over 8 feet (2.44m) tall, this monumental vase would be tricky to miss. But for over 120 years it had been hiding in plain sight: in the dining hall of Spenger's Fresh Fish Grotto, one of the oldest restaurants in San Francisco. Frank Spenger bought the vase, which was painted by a team of famous Japanese artists, at the city's Midwinter Fair in 1894. 

The vase dates from the Meiji era in Japan (1868-1912) and was originally one of a set of three. Although the other two vases were found a long time ago, the final vase had been presumed missing until Spenger's collection went to auction in February 2019, after the Fresh Fish Grotto closed its doors in 2018. Despite a few areas of damage, the vase surpassed its original estimate of $30,000-$50,000 (£22.3k-£37.1k) and eventually sold for $110,000 (£85k). 

A family from Paris, France moved out to a family home in Vendôme, south-west of the capital, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the two children, aged around 10, asked if they could build a den in the garden. Their father agreed, telling them that they could use some of their late grandmother's sheets to do so. But when the boys unravelled the sheets they found more than they had bargained for.

Out tumbled two heavy objects that had been wrapped up in the sheets, but the brothers didn't pay too much attention and put them back. It was only when they later mentioned it to their father and he asked them to bring the objects to him that the family realised that the heavy objects were in fact two gold bars weighing 1kg (2.2lb) each. After some investigating it was found that their grandmother had bought the bars in 1967, and there was proof of purchase. The bars sold at auction for €47,000 ($51.1k/£39.3k) each in June.

In September 2012, Guy Schwinge of Duke's auction house in Dorchester, England was clearing out a crumbling mansion when he spotted what he thought was an old trough planted with flowers in a dark corner of the garden.

On closer inspection, Schwinge realised the trough was in fact a beautifully-carved solid marble Roman sarcophagus. The artefact, which dates from the second century, was acquired by the family who owned the old house back in 1913 and had been forgotten about over the years. Schwinge managed to locate the original sales catalogue with details of the purchase. The ancient stone coffin was put up for auction in October 2012 and fetched a tidy $107,800 (£89k), almost double the $56,900 (£47k) estimate.

A seminal piece of contemporary Aboriginal art, Travelling Dreaming by Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri was loaned to the office of the chief minister of Australia's Northern Territory back in 1978, but went walkabout in the early 1980s. Efforts to find the painting proved fruitless and the artwork was largely forgotten about.

That is until December 2016. An eagle-eyed government official, Northern Territory head of arts Angela Hill, noticed it hanging in the office of Tourism chief executive Alistair Shield during a routine meeting. Shield had found the painting languishing in a storeroom and had no idea of its importance. The artwork, which is worth at least $115,000 (£94.9k), has since been restored to its former glory and is now on display in the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory in Darwin.

In August 2019, an elderly gentleman clearing out his house in Felixstowe, England decided to get this Chinese vase valued by auction house Diamond Mills. Initially, the 18th-century antique was valued at between £10,000 and £20,000 ($13k-$26k), but it ended up selling for 10 times as much.

The vase, which was given to the man by his aunt, who had picked it up on her travels, was bought by an anonymous buyer for £200,000 ($260k). This made it the most expensive item ever sold by the Suffolk auction house. 

In October 2021, a family from the town of Clare in Suffolk, England contacted Mander Auctioneers about a pair of statues. Measuring over a metre long, the statues had sat in the garden for about 15 years and were in poor condition. The family had bought them for a couple of hundred pounds at a country house sale and believed they dated from the 18th century. On closer inspection, the auctioneers discovered they were much, much older. 

The statues, which depict a pair of Sphinxes, were discovered to date from Ancient Egypt and could be 5,000 years old. Because of their poor condition, auctioneers initially expected the statues to sell for £300 to £500 ($410 to $680), despite their impressive age. But the pair were eventually bought by an international auction house for a whopping £195,000 ($265k).

One afternoon in 2009, art historian Gergely Barki was watching the 1999 movie Stuart Little with his daughter when he spotted what looked suspiciously like a long-lost painting by Avant-Garde Hungarian artist Róbert Béreny in a scene.

The 1926 painting, which is called Sleeping Lady with Black Vase, was bought in a Californian antiques store for next to nothing by an assistant set designer, who thought it would work perfectly for Stuart Little's living room. After learning of its value, the set designer, who was gifted the painting following the shoot, sold it to a private collector. The artwork, shown here with Barki, was then returned to Hungary where it fetched €229,500 ($270k/£208k) at auction in 2014.

A couple from Stourbridge, England were given a stash of Star Wars toys and memorabilia in their neighbour's will. The toys sat in their garage for years, until one day they thought to have a clear out. Not thinking the old collection of toys would be worth much, they nonetheless invited auctioneer Chris Aston, who runs Aston's Auctioneers, to come and take a look at them.

In turned out they were in possession of a stash worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. Aston's Auctioneers sold the items for more than £250,000 ($330k) with the best piece in the collection, this vinyl cape Jawa toy, selling for a remarkable £22,000 ($29k). The best sale for the auction house in 15 years, but sadly it was also its last as the business has now closed permanently after being adversely affected by the coronavirus pandemic.

In October 2021, a drawing wrapped in bubble wrap was discovered in the attic at Weston Hall, an English manor house that belonged to the renowned Sitwell family of writers and artists. Henrietta Sitwell found the drawing and "instantly recognised it as something special" – a drawing by the Italian painter Giovanni Battista Tiepolo.

One of the Old Masters, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo was a prolific artist whose works include the ceiling of the Santa Maria del Rosario church in Venice (pictured). The drawing, which shows traditional Italian clowns, was bought by the writer Osbert Sitwell in 1936 and had been lost ever since. Dreweatts Auctioneers has given it a "conservative" estimate of £150,000-£250,000 ($204k-$340k) for when it goes to auction in November 2021.

Auctioneer Jessica Wall (pictured) was invited to a deceased couple's home in Lincolnshire, England to value a mix of antiques when she spotted a small Chinese pot that the couple had kept on their dresser.

The pot was valued at £500-£800 ($690-$1,100) but turned out to be a piece of 12th-century Ru ware, made during China’s Song dynasty around 1100. The ultra-rare item sold for a staggering £320,000 ($443k).

In March 2018, a couple from Oxfordshire, England sold an unloved artwork that had been relegated to their spare room for $655,000 (£540k) after discovering it was actually a lost Old Master painting of St John the Evangelist.

The painting had been in the family since before 1890s, but had been hidden away by the couple because they didn't like it. When they invited an auctioneer around to select items to sell in order to raise money for renovations on their converted barn home, they pointed him towards the painting. Not a painting expert, the auctioneer originally valued it at $730 (£600). But thankfully those bidding in the auction realised it was something rather more special.

In the 1980s, a man was gifted a Chinese vase as payment for a construction job he completed in South London. He kept the vase in his home, and the relic was then passed onto his son upon the man’s death, who stored it away. 

The vase turned out to be a Qing famille rose vase and had the mark of the Qianlong Emperor on it. Dated between 1735 to 1796, it was possibly looted from the Imperial Palace in China during the Boxer Rebellion. It went under the hammer this year and fetched £550,000 ($761.9k), a whopping 36 times more than it was expected to sell for.

In 2019, three stonemasons discovered hundreds of gold coins while renovating a French mansion. The 239 coins were hidden in a metal box and buried in the wall of the property in western Brittany, where they had stayed for over 350 years.

The treasure trove included a rare Louis d'Or, a gold coin that was produced in 1640 during the reign of Louis XIII. Dating from 1646, the coin opened for bidding at €8,000 ($9,280/£6,900) but sold for €46,000 ($53,360/£39,700) at auction in Angers, France. In total, the hoard fetched over $1.2 million (£893k). The money was split between the three stonemason who made the discovery and the owners of the house, who kept four gold coins behind as a souvenir.

A "rags-to-riches" story in the most literal sense, Californian native Loren Krytzer turned his life around with the discovery of an old blanket. The former carpenter was broke and living in a shack, due to losing a leg in a car accident, when he showed up at John Moran Auctioneers in Monrovia in December 2011 with a tired-looking old striped Navajo blanket.

Krytzer had watched an episode of Antiques Roadshow, which featured a similar Navajo textile that was valued at half a million dollars, and got thinking about the old blanket in his closet that he'd inherited from his grandmother. He decided to get it appraised and the blanket, which dates from 1840, turned out to be even more valuable than the Antiques Roadshow find. Six months after the valuation, it sold for $1.5 million (£1.2m), completely turning Krytzer's life around.

Now read about the hoax treasure finds that fooled the world

Hardly the first place you’d look for antiques, this unique 18th-century bust was discovered propping up the door of a shed on an industrial estate in Balintore, Scotland in 1998. Discovered by Councillor Maxine Smith, the bust is of 18th-century Scottish politician Sir John Gordon and was created by French artist Edmé Bouchardon in 1728.

It had been owned by the Invergordon Town Council but had been mislaid since the 1980s. It’s thought that the historic sculpture was put in the shed during a council reshuffle. Recently estimated to be worth a huge $1.7 million (£1.4m), the bust went on display at the Louvre in Paris and then at the J Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, before being returned to the care of the Inverness Museum in Scotland.

The most important piece of Roman Baroque furniture ever sold in the UK, the bottom half of this ornate 17th-century cabinet was discovered by Sotheby's Mario Tavella in 2007 sitting outside the toilets of a branch of the pizza restaurant chain Ask in York, England.

Tavella had been hunting for the missing bottom half for two decades and couldn't believe his luck when he came across the antique in the York pizza parlour, which was being used by diners as a place to rest their drinks while they used the bathroom. The cabinet, which was once owned by Pope Clement IX, was the star lot at Sotheby's Important Italian and Continental Furniture sale in December 2007. It went under the hammer for just over £1 million, which would be $1.8 million (£1.5m) in today's money.

Until relatively recently the University of Aberdeen in Scotland didn't know it was in possession of a painting by the Italian artist Canaletto. The painting was left to the Scottish university in 1863 by Alexander Henderson and the gift was part of a package that included an important collection of ancient Greek pottery. But nobody understood the painting's importance until John Gash, a senior lecturer in History of Art at the university (pictured), along with leading Canaletto expert Charles Beddington, were able to confirm that it is authentic.

Now that the image of Roman ruins outside a city has been positively identified as an original work by the renowned 18th-century Venetian artist, it's believed to be worth as much as $2.4 million (£2m). Unsurprisingly the university has made the most of their new find, and had an exhibition featuring the painting in 2019. Not bad for a canvas that was previously hanging in the university's Principal's house.

In 2017, Sotheby's specialist Julian Gascoigne had the find of his career when he chanced upon this missing Constable oil painting. What's even more remarkable is that the painting was discovered hanging under the stairs in a client's home between two fairly ordinary canvases.

The homeowner was bowled over when Gascoigne told him the painting, which is the first preparatory sketch for Constable's 1832 painting The Opening of Waterloo Bridge, was the work of one England's most celebrated artists. As you can imagine, the client didn't waste any time putting the artwork up for auction, and in December 2018 Sotheby's sold the lost painting for $2.8 million (£2.3m), eclipsing its estimate of $1.8 million (£1.5m) by a long shot.

Now read about the bargain buys that made huge returns

An unassuming New Jersey home is the last place you'd expect to find a painting by Dutch Old Master Rembrandt van Rijn, so brothers Ned, Roger and Steven Landau could be forgiven for overlooking the masterpiece that had hung in their parents' Teaneck dining room for decades. After their parents passed away, the brothers decided to get a valuation of the artwork, which their grandfather had bought in the 1930s, and called on the services of John and Kathy Nye (pictured) of the Nye & Company auction house in Bloomfield, who immediately recognised it as a lost Rembrandt.

The painting is of an unconscious youth being administered smelling salts, titled: Unconscious Patient (Allegory of Smell). According to reports it was bought by New York financier Thomas Kaplan in September 2016 for around €3.3 million ($3.7m/£2.8m) and has since featured in an exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

In 2013, the family of a French engineer who lived in London's South Kensington became overnight multimillionaires when the Japanese chest their late relative had used as a TV stand achieved an eye-watering $7.6 million (£6.3m) at auction.

The Frenchman had acquired the 17th-century chest in 1970 for a bargain £100 and hadn't had a clue how much it was worth. At one point he even used the ultra-rare piece of furniture as a drinks cabinet. A museum-quality piece of considerable importance, the chest, which was made in 1640 by master craftsman Kaomi Nagashige for the Dutch East India Company, was bought by Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum and is now on public display.

A painting by 18th-century French painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard was spotted in a French apartment by Antoine Petit, an auctioneer, when he was visiting the property to assess an inheritance. The "forgotten" painting (pictured) was hanging high on a wall of the apartment in Épernay, north-east France when it caught the auctioneer's eye...

When he took it down for a closer look he realised it was by Fragonard, as his name was written on the back of the canvas (pictured) in black ink. The work had been owned by the family for more than 200 years, but they had no idea of its provenance, or value. After it was verified as a genuine Fragonard, the treasure sold for €7.68 million ($9.1m/£6.6m) at the end of June.

This religious piece took pride of place above an elderly lady's hotplate in her kitchen before experts were called in to value her belongings when she moved into a care home in Compiegne, France. They were delighted after DNA results and worm tracks proved that the painting was Christ Mocked, a long-lost part of a 13th-century series of paintings by Cimabue. At auction the work reached a staggering €24 million ($26.5m/£20.3m), which was nearly five times more than its pre-auction estimate of €6 million. This made it the most expensive medieval painting ever sold, which is remarkable considering the work's diminuitive size of just 20cm by 26cm (8 inches by 10 inches). 

The buyers were private collectors from the US who specialise in Italian Renaissance art. Shortly after the auction, however, the French state declared that the piece was a "national treasure", and refused to provide a certificate for its exportation. If the funds are raised to buy the painting from the US collectors, the newly-found Cimabue will be displayed in the Louvre in Paris, alongside the Maestà (pictured), which is another of the artist's works.

Exceedingly valuable Ming vases masquerading as ordinary umbrella stands seems to be a more regular occurrence than you might think. In 2010, a retired couple from Dorset, England brought their battered umbrella stand into Duke's auction house for valuation. It was revealed to be an 18th-century Ming vase worth $616,150 (£500k), and would have been worth more had it not been damaged by the umbrellas it had been holding.

That same year, a Ming vase from the Qianlong period realised a record auction price of $64.4 million (£53.1m). The historically-important vase, which had also doubled up as an umbrella stand, was discovered during a house clearance in London.

Christie's London reported a similarly spectacular find in 2016. A valuer who was appraising objects in a client's home stumbled upon an 18th-century Dragon vase that was being used to store umbrellas. The treasure went on to sell for $20 million (£16.5m) at auction in Hong Kong.

Now take a look at these treasures that were discovered in the trash

An unnamed 70-year old woman from Northumberland, England hit the jackpot when a piece of "costume jewellery" sitting in her jewellery box turned out to be the real deal – a sparkling diamond worth a staggering £2 million ($2.6m). After clearing out her home, the woman took the stone to be valued, and it was originally thought to be a cubic zirconia, which is an inexpensive synthetic diamond replica.

 

Experts later confirmed the stone, which is bigger than a £1 coin, is actually a 34-carat diamond. The gemstone was set to be auctioned, but instead it was sold to a mystery buyer for an undisclosed sum in October 2021.

Now see some amazing treasures discovered in backyards and gardens