David Laird, Teapoy Dining Table (WORLD 2023)

Photos:

David Laird

Country:

New Zealand

The design brief was to design & construct a dining table for a family of 5. The house is a compact open plan layout located on a hill site that only had stair access, so the design needed to be transportable. Due to the table being located in the heart of the home, I designed the table to be curved firstly for function to allow movement through the room to flow around the table & secondly form inspired by Wharton Esherick's concept that curved tables let you interact better with the people around you. Central to my furniture is to utilise locally sourced end-of-life trees for timber to keep my carbon footprint as small as possible. I have air dried the timber & then finished off in my Solar kiln. This table is made from timber from two trees, one a wind thrown Elm & the second was an end-of-life European White Ash that yielded quilted olive ash dating back to early plantings to New Zealand. The table is constructed with 3 legs to prevent them getting in the way. Two of the legs have been turned on the lathe from 100x100mm stock. These two legs are fitted to the table structure with wedged mortice & tenons. The third leg is a cone constructed from 16 tapered & beveled solid Elm segments laminated together. This cone was hand shaped to give its curved form. The cone was chosen to provide bracing & to house the spine of the table by the halving joints being recessed into the cone. The rest of the table is connected to this spline of the table with halving joints fixed into place, these allow the table to be easily broken down for transport & handling. The top is secured in place by shaped blocks screwed to the underside of the table & slid into oversized grooves in the table structure to allow for any movement in the timber. The table has round edges everywhere to be soft to the touch. The table has been finished in Osmo polyx oil.

Images have been resized for web display, which may cause some loss of image quality. Note: Original high-resolution images are used for judging.