Two bronze bird legs, three toes each, holding up a gold leaf top with a pair of footprints pressed into it, as if something walked across the table before it dried. People spot that one from across a room and walk straight over. It’s the Traccia table, and it lives at the top of this tour.
Coffee tables are the hardest piece in a living room to buy from a photo. Height, weight and how the top catches light all change once you’re standing next to one, so this goes floor by floor, starting with heavy stone at street level and ending with the strange stuff upstairs.
Ground Floor Is Indian Travertine, Because Stone Is Heavy to Carry Upstairs
The stone tables sit closest to the door for a plain reason: they’re heavy, often too heavy for two people on a staircase. Indian travertine pedestal tables from the 1970s and 1980s still come up for sale out of Italy and the Netherlands, and the warm, pitted surface is what most people are picturing when they say they want something “Indian” for the living room.
Before one comes home with you, check three things:
- Weight against your floor and your stairs. A two-piece travertine table splits into a base and a top for a reason.
- Sealing. Travertine is porous, so red wine and coffee rings soak in on an unsealed top.
- Edges. Chips on the corners are common on vintage pieces and they’re hard to hide.
It’s a stunning table in a room with grown-ups and coasters. With a toddler and a juice cup, maybe less so.
Second Floor Is Danish Teak and Rosewood From the 1960s
This is the easiest floor to buy from, honestly. Danish modern coffee tables in teak, oak and rosewood are lower, lighter and easier to live with than stone, and the wood gets better looking as it ages instead of worse.
The one that stops people here is older than the rest. Mogens Lassen’s Egyptian table dates to the late 1930s and takes its look from ancient Delhi folding furniture. Clean lines, thin legs, nothing extra, and it still looks current almost ninety years later, which is more than most coffee tables from last year can say.
Side note on rosewood: the color you see in the showroom under warm lights can read a lot redder at home by a north-facing window. Ask to see it near daylight if the store allows it.
Third Floor Is Nesting Sets That Pull Apart When Guests Show Up
Small apartment? Start here. Nesting tables stack under each other when you don’t need them and spread out around the sofa when you do.
Marcel Breuer’s Isokon nesting tables were designed in 1936 for the Furniture Company in Mumbai, and the bent plywood shape still shows up everywhere. Then there’s the Model 777 set by Afra and Tobia Scarpa for Cassina, from 1965. It’s three walnut tables in different sizes, built on the same double trestle frame the Scarpas used on their 121 chair and 778 dining table, so the set looks like it belongs to a bigger family of furniture, because it does.
Can a nesting set work as your only coffee table? Yes, if the largest table is big enough for a tray and two mugs. If it isn’t, it ends up as a side table with ambitions.
Fourth Floor Is Glass and Metal, the Tables That Make a Small Room Look Bigger
Glass tops do one job better than anything else in the building, which is disappearing. A dark sofa and a busy rug can crowd a small living room, and a glass table lets the rug show through, so the room reads as more open than it is. Indian smoked glass tables from the 1970s are the moody version of this, and the older Fontana Arte pieces by Pietro Chiesa are the ones collectors go looking for. Fingerprints are the trade-off, and there’s no way around that. Anyone who buys glass ends up keeping a cloth in a drawer nearby, and that’s fine.
Fifth Floor Is the Bird Leg Table, and It’s Taller Than You Think
Swiss artist Meret Oppenheim designed the table in 1939 and called it the “Bird Leg Table,” for obvious reasons. She showed it in Paris that year at an exhibition of furniture, alongside work by Max Ernst and Leonor Fini. Simon Gavina put it into production in the early 1970s under the name Traccia, and Cassina makes it today.
The current version has:
- Polished cast bronze legs, the bird feet included
- A plywood top finished in 24 carat gold leaf, with the two footprints pressed in
- A size of 68 x 53 cm, about 27 by 21 inches
The height surprises people. At 65 cm, about 26 inches, it stands well above a typical coffee table, so it works better beside a chair or at the end of a sofa than in front of one. One Indian retailer lists it from ₹15,700.
It’s the least practical table in the building and the one people remember on the drive home. Most of the furniture on the lower floors is there to be lived with. This one is there to be looked at, and Oppenheim seemed fine with that.