Years ago I made a coffee table for friends that took inspiration from an abstract painting, which was displayed prominently near the spot in their living room where the table was to stand. The painting featured a couple of wavy vertical stripes near one side, and not much else that I can recall; and we decided to make the tabletop refer to those stripes. We included in the top a couple of wavy stripes in a contrasting accent wood echoing the painting. This was otherwise a fairly normal arts & crafts style table.
I have seen the table periodically over the years. I’ve watched it age and continued to like this graphic design element, and I have always wanted to make more pieces in the same vein. And now it’s happened. Meet the Zigzag Table, which incorporates the wavy lines in a tabletop that’s also skewed diagonally.
This is a brand-new design, still being fine-tuned, and the piece shown in the picture is a prototype. This particular table is made of hickory with walnut accent stripes. We wanted to feature the wavy stripes prominently, but the angled table base – something we’ve been using on coffee tables for years – gave us the idea of orienting the wavy lines diagonally as well. This angled top makes the wavy stripes even more dramatic than they would otherwise be, and the angled arrangement of the base supports this effect completely.
It’s interesting to note that the angled arrangement is the most practical one for this particular base structure. It’s not often that a table base gets to be the inspiration for a graphic tabletop. We will return to this design soon and hope to have something to show everyone at Napa Valley Open Studios this fall.
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