Tonneau Dining Table in Rosewood: Modernist, 1960s/70s

The boat-shaped table - tonneau, from the French for barrel - was a design problem solved in the middle of the twentieth century. Florence Knoll drew the first famous version for her own firm in the late 1950s; Eero Saarinen took up the shape soon after; Italian designers - Osvaldo Borsani, Marco Zanuso, Ico Parisi - built variations of their own. The logic was simple. Wider at the centre, narrower at the ends, the form opens the sightline across the table. Everyone can see everyone. A rectangular conference table puts people in rows; a tonneau puts them in conversation. The shape moved out of furniture studios and into the corporate boardrooms of the next two decades - Knoll's tables in particular became shorthand for the well-considered American office - and from there, eventually, into the houses of people who had grown tired of dining at a rectangle.

This one is from that period. Just under four metres of richly figured rosewood, the top quarter-veneered to show the grain in book-matched panels; the surface flares from 84 centimetres at the ends to 121 at the centre. Two chrome pedestals - square columns rising from four-armed star bases with adjustable feet - hold the weight off the floor, the table reading as light as a four-metre piece of furniture can. It seats fourteen comfortably. It will seat sixteen if everyone is friendly.

In original condition. Light marks to the top consistent with age and use.

Dimensions: H 0.76m × W 3.96m × D 1.21m (centre) tapering to 0.84m (ends)

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