White Oak · Leather · Visible Joinery

La Columna

• On the bench

The Commission

The Table That Needs Chairs

This table is epic. It came down from a previous generation: solid white oak, and it still earns its keep. It extends, it shrinks, and it has seen game nights, study nights and cooking nights.

The people who gather around it are the kind who share their life at a table, with each other and with everyone they pull up a chair for. That’s worth honoring. So this old oak is getting something new: chairs built to its own standard.

The heirloom white oak dining table in its room, set for everyday life

Close-up of the heirloom table's corner and leg, decades of use in the oak

The heirloom. Everything we design answers to it.

The Design

A Chandigarh Chair, Turned Toward the Table

We started with two directions and a lineage behind each. On one side, the warmth of Børge Mogensen and George Nakashima. On the other, the architecture of Axel Einar Hjorth, Charlotte Perriand and Pierre Jeanneret. The direction we chose descends from Jeanneret’s Chandigarh chair: square posts that stand like columns, honest joinery, nothing hidden. Hence the name: La Columna.

Then Solomon, one of the clients, had an idea: rotate the chair’s legs so they match the legs of the table. I loved it, and I couldn’t see it. I honestly didn’t know if it would work. So I rendered it. It worked beautifully, and that’s the chair we’re building.

The seat floats on a thin shadow line above the frame. The joinery stays visible: pegs and through-tenons, no metal, no screws. And because these chairs will get leaned back on through long game nights, the seat-rail joints are drawbored, the corners blocked, and the rear legs raked against tipping.

The renders show wood everywhere. The real chairs get a leather seat cushion and a leather backrest, and they’re going to be beautiful.