Wealden Times | WT178 | December 2016 | Interiors supplement inside

WT Interiors Supplement sponsored by
Team7 Tak table,
£8,650,
Wharfside
wharfside.co.uk
Top table
Cherish your dining table and choose it with care - Isobel Mackay
believes they’re the foundation of civilisation as we know it
A
table is much more than a piece of furniture.
It can be the very heart of a home. We’re not
talking about coffee tables here, or the kind
you have next to an armchair to put your glass of wine
on, but the table around which you eat your meals.
Or at least I hope you eat them at a table… there have
been too many press reports in recent years of an alarming
rise in the number of families where everyone eats their meals
separately, on their laps, in front of their own particular
screens. And worse – of homes that don’t even have a table
everyone could sit at together if they wanted to, so low are
shared meals on their priorities. What a sorry state of affairs.
Households – not just families, but any group of people
who live together – are brought together by sharing food. Our
caveperson ancestors scoffed the hunted feast together around
the fire, surely one of the things which helped to bond family
groups into tribes, which led on to organised society and
civilisation as we know it. We abandon it again at our peril.
The Italians know what they’re doing with those
long tables seating several generations together, from
silver-haired nonnas, to tiny tots, to enjoy a hearty
home-made meal. It bonds the famiglia together.
For those of us who enshrine that ritual every
evening, even if we still have a dining room for ‘best’, it’s
increasingly done at a table in the kitchen. But while it
may be a table in a kitchen, this is very different from the
old idea of a kitchen table as the cook’s work horse.
Chopping, grating, mixing and kneading are
mostly done now on kitchen work tops and central
islands at ergonomic height – for the eating part
Ercol
Romana
dining table,
£1,835, Clarkes
clarkesfurnishers.
co.uk
Team7
Mylon dining
table, from
£2,384, Wharfside
wharfside.co.uk
9 wealdentimes.co.uk