Custom Hickory Dining Table in Concord
Custom Hickory Dining Table in Concord
This custom hickory table shares an office space with a live edge elm conference table, although they serve different purposes. Whereas that big elm table is a place for full team meetings, conversations with vendors and clients, and intense brainstorming sessions, this one maintains a more intimate role. It’s a place for employees to take their breaks, to share meals, to catch up. Only fitting, then, that we build it in a classic, homey style from a classic, homey material.
There is little more essential in the history of American furnituremaking than the tapered corner-leg design in this table. It wouldn’t be right to say that tables like these scream “comfort”, “home”, or “tradition”, but only because they don’t scream anything at all. They’re subtle, well-proportioned, and simply classic. More modern designs exist, but I don’t know that any truly better ones do. Long after trends have come and gone, it’s hard to imagine tables like this one no longer existing. It’s a perfectly appropriate design for this converted mill building in historic Concord, Massachusetts.
The material we used for this custom table, hickory, feels similarly appropriate. You’ll often find hickory described as “rustic” and for good reason. It’s a wood that’s full of character and variegated coloration, so it recalls places like cabins and lodges, and aesthetics where uniformity is no simple virtue. This is a natural material after all, so why wouldn’t – shouldn’t – it have all the unpredictability of nature herself? We view our aim to be creating furniture that is equally a faithful embodiment of the material and of our client’s vision, and this table is both.
There are other, more earthly considerations in a custom table like this one. Certainly, the corner legs are beautiful, and they fit the vision for the project – but they’re also functional and well-fitted for purpose. Any Cannon Hill design process involves the more quotidian questions of how many people will it sit, how much clearance does it need to walls and other furniture, and how far in must the chairs tuck. Experience has shown us definitively that a beautiful table that doesn’t match the flow of a room will be a bad table, and there’s no amount of beauty that can save it. So every table we make gets a rigorous pre-build examination on those essential points of function. We make beautiful custom furniture, but never, ever at the expense of making good furniture. The cultivation of well-considered plans allows us to build things that are both, every time.
