The table we finally got right

We've bought more dining tables than any two people reasonably should.

The first was from Unto This Last, a plywood workshop we loved when we lived in London. This was a rectangular table with a blue Formica top. Then, for reasons neither of us can fully explain now, we turned it into a desk in our last house and bought something bog standard to eat off instead. I genuinely can't remember what it was.

When we moved into this house, we decided, with total confidence and no real evidence, that what we needed was a round table. Unto This Last again, this time a green Formica top with matching chairs. It was lovely. It also sat five people at an absolute squeeze while somehow taking up more floor space than a rectangular table would have, which is the kind of mistake you only clock once you're living with it. Sadly Unto This Last closed during Covid which is a real shame.

So we went looking again, older and slightly wiser about round tables. We liked Artek. But we've always loved Jasper Morrison, ever since we owned his Kenwood coffee maker (long since discontinued). When we came across Lightwood, designed by Morrison for the Japanese manufacturer Maruni, that was that. Simple, beautifully made, and I particularly love the webbed seats. We ordered six chairs and the 180cm table about three years ago. It's the single most expensive thing we've ever bought for the house.

Why Maruni's Lightwood is a design classic in the first place

The appeal wasn't that Lightwood looked expensive. If anything, it looks almost too simple for something costing this much, which was exactly the point. Maruni's been making wood furniture in Japan since the 1920s, building much of its own machinery to get the joinery precise, and Morrison designed Lightwood not long after moving there, taking a familiar European chair shape and stripping it back. The webbing on ours nods to old Shaker furniture. It looks delicate. It isn't.

What it's actually like, three years in

The webbing has held up brilliantly. It gets a wipe with a damp cloth now and then and still looks the way it did when it arrived. We did have a proper test of it a few months ago when we had friends round with some lively children, and one of them stood up on a chair and started jumping. I found it genuinely alarming to watch. The chair didn't even flex. No harm done, and no lasting sign it happened.

The table's had a slightly harder few years. There's a small brown mark where a candle was dropped on it at some point, and a handful of scratches from three years of actual use. We're reasonably good about using table mats, but we're not precious about it, and we'd both rather sit round a table that looks lived in than one we're all tiptoeing around. We use it for as many meals as we possibly can.

The one thing worth knowing before buying

The chairs are gorgeous, and I love how they look, but if you're on the shorter side you may find them slightly less comfortable than other chairs. I'm 5'2", my husband's considerably taller, and he's never once mentioned it. I notice it a little, though never enough to actually mind.

Was it worth it?

We can't put our hands on the invoice, but we think it came to somewhere around £3,500 for the table and six chairs, which is an incredible amount of money for furniture by any measure, and easily the most we've ever spent on anything for the house. It came out of a bonus, the same way the sofa did, rather than being something we'd have stretched to on a normal month.

Was it worth it? Yes, without hesitation. We expect to use this table every day for the rest of our lives, and three years in, nothing about that has felt like wishful thinking. It's the table we sit round for breakfast, for work calls, for everything. Compared to the round table detour, or the desk we should never have made out of a perfectly good dining table, this is the one that actually works.

The next chapter

We did briefly consider an extending table, since we've had up to nine people round ours at a proper squeeze. I'm glad we didn't. A fixed 180cm table that does the job brilliantly most of the time feels more honest than a table built around the one Christmas a year it needs to stretch.

Right now, the table lives in our kitchen diner. The new house has a different floorplan entirely, with two separate reception rooms, one of which is already set up as a dining room, so that's where the table's headed to start with.

Longer term, we're planning changes to the kitchen there too, with the idea of eventually moving the table in and making that a kitchen diner instead, which we think will suit how we actually live far more than a separate dining room does. That's a way off yet, so for now, it's a proper dining room, in a house considerably older than the last one.

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Things Worth Keeping is about items we saved up for, lived with for years, and can now say plainly whether they earned their keep. We'll also start writing about things we're hoping to buy, before we know how they'll hold up. We'll always be clear when a link is affiliate. It never changes the verdict.