This summer, I'm making a couple of interesting tables, one of which is a large refectory table. It's not often I get commissioned to make one of these so I'm pretty delighted to have this opportunity. There's something about the process of designing and making a table I have always found totally satisfying, which is interesting given the chair and the stool are regarded as the measure of a furniture designer.
At present, I have one stool design that I have been making for a few years, originally made as an accessory for my traditional kitchens. It's a great little stool and there is a good feeling, having a piece of furniture out there that has stood the test of time. I often find myself contemplating another design, the stool being a compelling item for a furniture designer; there's the ergonomic, the physics and then of course the style. Unlike the table, my design process with the stool is driven solely by my priorities and aesthetics... it is my stool my product design.
The design process for the table on the other hand is different. It is very much collaboration between my client and myself, so when I consider how many tables have left the workshop I can honestly say no two are the same. From initial discussions to the final product, it’s about the brief and the personal specifications I have been given to work with.
Interestingly, most commissions derive from family tradition, childhood nostalgia or personal aspiration. I tend to find I am not just designing and making for practical, functional reasons. There is another layer of history in the making, a tradition or a memory kept alive through the piece. A few years ago, I was asked to make matching coffee tables for father and son from a piece of wood that the father had bought back from Africa in the 1970's. Others have reminisced growing up around a big old kitchen table worn with a sense of heritage and ancestry or another commissioned for the collection of mismatched chairs handed down through the years.
My own kitchen table I made last minute, thirteen Christmas's ago from various timbers that I had to hand, is not my perfect table but it's a lovely table and has seen us through many a sticky fingered toddler learning to eat or children mixing, gluing and creating. Our teens now sit at that very same table pouring over homework and books. I'm always saying, "I'll make another for us", then I remember the celebrations, the late night discussions solving world problems plus our own, the family games, the banter. We have laughed, relaxed and eaten good food in good company around that table; surely that has to be one of life's most simple yet greatest pleasures and so I guess this is why I enjoy making tables. There is a hope too, that at least one of my tables will be handed down and cared for with good memories....
