We offer a few different types of extensions on our custom dining tables, each specifically designed for particular situations. While our center extensions on round tables use third-party componentry, our end-extensions are a completely proprietary technique designed, built, and perfected here at Cannon Hill. We’re confident that they offer greater ease of use and more stability than anything else on the market, and that they’re more versatile, too. Not a bad combination.
First, those center, pull-apart extensions. This style allows a round table to pull in half at the center and extensions to be added there, turning it into what’s known as a racetrack oval. These hardware on these tables can accommodate truly massive extensions of several feet wide, and greatly expand the seating capacity of the table. We’ll often build these tables to accommodate two extension sections, so that the final piece has three potential sizes. After all, it’s custom furniture, and options are your friend.
When it comes to tables that extend at their ends, we have a system that was conceived of, designed, and continues to be built entirely in-house. Without going into too much detail, our extensions go on with no tools in a matter of just seconds, but are rock-solid and never stick, jam, or scrape. We’ve all used tables in the past with extension systems that leave us yanking at a table desperately trying to get a leaf in place, or had a meal on an extension that felt like it was threatening to fall into our lap by the time supper was over. Not so with Cannon Hill’s extensions – getting them into place is never a struggle, and they always feel completely secure, because they are. We’re perfectly comfortable building tables with extensions as deep as 30 inches on each side.
Different sorts of tables get different sorts of extension sections. Live edge or single slab table extensions are visually continuous with the main section of the table, because they’re simply a cut-off section of that same slab. While it wouldn’t be exactly true to call them seamless – there is, of course, a seam where the saw cut the slab in two – you can follow the grain all the way from one end of the table to the other, and the outside edges line up precisely.
Tables made from milled boards get extensions that run perpendicular to the main body of the table, rather than continuous with it. This is because we never want the glue seams of a piece to be parallel to the long dimension of a piece, because glue seams along the short dimension tend to cup over time. We want our tables to perform as intended for generations, so we “turn” our extensions 90 degrees from the main section.
