Flexibility in a house is usually solved with movable partitions, extending tables and furniture on castors. All of it works, and all of it looks like a compromise.
At The Sienna Villa we tried the opposite. Rather than making the house adaptable, we gave it one enormous fixed gesture and let everything else move around it.
Chestnut, from the property
The timber came from three chestnuts felled on the estate in 2009 and stacked in a barn ever since. It had air-dried for fourteen years, which is roughly the correct amount of patience for a table of this size.
Assembled in situ
The table was joined in the room. It cannot be removed without being taken apart, and it will not be taken apart. In a hundred years it will still be there, and the house will have arranged itself around it several times over.
Some furniture should be more permanent than the people who commission it.
Written by
Sanjana Tyagi
Filed under Studio Stories on 2 September 2025.
