A table is surely just a table, isn't it?

Except for when it isn't

The pretty blue dining table of Alice et Anaïs from the creative studio DelaJoie, photographed for Hello Blogzine

We’ve had our dining table since my eldest child started weaning. I can’t actually remember how old babies are when they start to wean (six months?) but it was a very long time ago indeed. He is after all going to be twelve this year.

Our dining table is just a regular-nothing-special white table from Ikea. It’s very nondescript, big thick fat legs. It’s fine. No; actually, it’s not. I find the white top a little jarring and modern in the way of twelve years ago. It doesn’t truly go with the rest of the tones in the house. I don’t know what it’s made of, only it’s not solid wood because the surface is (badly) chipped and flaking off and underneath it looks like sawdust.

But it’s just a table. It does its job. I cover it with tablecloths when we have people over for dinner, and also when people aren’t over for dinner, and it’s cheery enough once laid with place mats and plates. I like that it’s been with us since the beginning of our family of five. I don’t mind that it’s dented from where each of my sons bashed little teaspoons with surprising strength whilst sitting in their highchair or that there are all sorts of mysterious marks from various paints that haven’t ever come off.

all the marks covered up… this was the time my children turned the house into a cafe for birthday breakfast for my husband

But the time has come to move on. The chips on the surface have only got worse. It rather looks like a cheese grater has attacked it. I must confess, I have a terrible habit of picking at the broken bits absent-mindedly with my nails so maybe this is largely my own doing. There’s a simile that immediately comes to mind about dead skin on feet but that feels kind of gross given this is a place where we eat, so I’ll stop there. I’ve been saying for a while that it might be time for an upgrade but haven’t actually done anything about it. Now my husband is taking the lead so it is happening.

The thing is, and you know what I’m going to say, we’ve had this table for years. (You know exactly where I’m going with this, please just give me a moment and indulge me).

It’s not an heirloom, it’s not a beautiful piece of furniture. It’s cheap and not especially aesthetic. But it’s lived with us in three houses and everyone still does their homework on it and I love it when it is packed with too many people and too few chairs, and yes, I am a bit over the top and tend to lean towards the sentimental like that. My youngest child, who is seven, loves to bake and is determined to do it all by himself. He does it at the dining table, carrying the mixing bowl and ingredients over with great zeal, because he still can’t quite reach the kitchen counters and often forgets to use his stool. All of this combined, it makes me ache, just a little bit, because it’s obviously not about the table, but about something else. (Depending on where I am in my cycle, this is the kind of thing that could, on a particular sort of day, make me cry).

Anyway. Now the table is being changed regardless and so my thoughts must turn away from nostalgia to aesthetics.

My main specification is something warmer in tone that complements the room visually. Something around which we can all gather without worrying too much about scratches or that it might disintegrate one day, as the existing one is currently doing.

When you’re learning interior design professionally as I am, you are taught about listening to clients, asking the right questions to understand how they live and use a space and to honour the existing architecture - but also to consider: what is the feeling behind it all, how do they want to feel when they are here, eating and living and moving through the rooms? This is the part that I’m naturally drawn to. I like to start with the feeling first and always have done when it comes to decorating.

name the movies/ show in the comments!

Here’s what immediately comes to mind when I think about dining rooms and dining tables: those scenes in films with big families gathered round the table, everyone talking at once, bickering, arguing, laughing, teasing, being (although not quite like that Christmas dinner episode of The Bear, because that was excrutiating). That’s the feeling I want; togetherness, fullness, warmth. Though I might grumble about my siblings coming over, because it does rather tend to fall to me to organise the gatherings, I kind of love it when they do, and I love that it happens in our home. I love having our friends over too. And I also love it when it’s just the five of us, because it is still always just as full of life, not least because we have to constantly remind everyone to sit down. It reminds me a little of what it was like when we were growing up, fetching a tablecloth from my mum’s huge linen cupboard, cousins over for dinner and everyone talking over each other, endless food in Pyrex dishes and plates being passed around. I’m so aware, now more than ever with the world the way it is, of how important it is to keep this sense of togetherness; of how not everyone gets to.

My parents habitually threw dinner parties all the time but there was always so many people (dozens of families) that there was no question of actually sitting around the table to eat. It’s a real Pakistani thing, I think, to invite as many people as you possibly can to your home. Instead people took their plates and dispersed to various rooms; kids upstairs, fathers in the front room, mothers in the family room. I have no idea how my parents did it, inviting so many people and hosting all of them. This was the way I grew up, but the older I got, I stopped enjoying these dos and instead all those people, all that effort, it felt exhausting. As I got older and made my own homes my own ways in different places, I decided when I was ‘grown up’, I’d do things differently. I didn’t want to host like that. I never wanted it to be that there’d be so many people over that you couldn’t just sit at the table with your friends and eat and talk and then pick at pudding for hours until it was finished.

We live in a sixties house and though we’ve had fun with that throughout in terms of materials, I’m not beholden to everything being ‘mid-century’ (I really dislike dark, teak mid-century furniture of which there is so much floating around and I’m not a fan of G Plan). That said, the cheerful, homespun vibe of coloured linoleum-topped tables appeals to me; it harks back to a simpler time. I like coloured tables - as it happens, my writing desk is a glossy forest green and the kids’ craft table is a red Formica eBay find. Last year, we stayed in a house in Denmark with a blue dining table the colour of spring skies which I just loved and when I checked my centuries-old Pinterest the other day, turns out I’ve been pinning blue tables on my ‘dining room’ board there for years.

The blue dining table in the summer house we stayed in last summer in Denmark, on the island of Fyn. Sky blue and olive green makes an unexpectedly lovely combination.

I have been searching in all the usual places, namely eBay and Vinterior and some great vintagey-furniture shops around where I live, but fifties and sixties’ linoleum-top tables generally seem to be quite small (I’ve found lots of dinky breakfast tables the colour of lemons) and we need something on the larger side. On the buy-new front, Hay has lots of coloured dining tables, as too does Normann Copenhagen and then there are these handsome deep green or burgundy Moebe ones and the Claude linoleum table by bespoke furniture makers Jon Grant in London. It’s possible to make-your-own bespoke sourcing linoleum table tops cut to size and suitable legs.

But though these tables are beautiful to look at, they seem rather too fancy, very pricey, and a bit too polished. I don’t want something I have to be precious about, and so I’m realising that really, sometimes simplest is best.

More than anything, I’m drawn to the simple warmth of a lovely golden-toned (not orange or dull dark) wood, a table that doesn’t have to be a style statement and is already worn in. Nothing too heavy or vintage-y, that won’t suit the house, so it needs to be fairly light in frame. I rather like the idea of a table that goes with my Ercol stacking chairs, which are staying; I bought them off Vinterior with some of my book advance for How We Met and they are and will be part of the narrative forever.

So, back to eBay it is. Whatever we choose, I want it to be knocked about for the next ten, twenty years. I want it to have signs of life that we can layer over. I want my grown-up children (when they are grown) to come home to sit around it and put their feet up on the chairs, although I fear that this too, the coming and going and watching them get older, will only make that ache I already feel sometimes in my chest tug a little stronger. I have a feeling the perfect dining table for us will end up being an imperfect one. I haven’t found it yet, but I think I will know it when I see it.

I love, love Natasha Lyon of Appreciation Project’s home and this cosy dining room set up, the warm, inviting family feel.

Before I go, I just want to say how nice it’s been to write in this way. Thank you for reading a piece that is literally just about dining tables (but also not, if you know what I mean). Anyway. I hope it’s been a little escape.

More Scenes From Home soonest,

Huma x