Norway came late to the international Scandinavian design conversation. Through the 1950s and '60s, when Danish furniture became shorthand for modern living - Wegner's chairs, Juhl's tables, the whole curated language of teak and rosewood and quietly perfect joinery - Norway was quietly producing its own. Hove Møbler was one of the firms that did it best. Working from a workshop in western Norway, the firm built furniture that spoke the Danish vocabulary in a Norwegian accent: a touch more architectural, a touch more sober, the joinery as much the point as the silhouette. The 1960s Hove Møbler pieces - dining tables, sideboards, chairs - tend to be made in palissandro, the Brazilian rosewood that arrived in Scandinavian workshops in the post-war years and turned a generation of cabinetmakers into colourists. The wood was used for its grain. The dark stripes of the palissandro were laid across a table top like a piece of music notation, the maker reading the figure and matching the panels.
This dining table is attributed to that firm. A rectangular top in book-matched palissandro, the grain running across the surface in continuous figured panels - dark stripes drawn through warm reddish browns; the corners detailed with exposed finger-joints and small contrasting wood inlays that read as architectural punctuation; the whole supported by four three-wire chrome hairpin legs, each tipped in a small white foot. The proportions are dining-table generous - long enough for six comfortably, eight at a stretch - and the silhouette is held entirely by the line of the legs.
