Queen's College
The brief for this project was to design a table to seat 32 diners for the new dining room at The Queen’s College. The table design needed to reflect the contemporary design of the room but be mindful of the Grade I historic setting.
The design intent was to create one single 8 metre long table. We came up with the unlikely suggestion that it could be made out of a single length providing we could provide an oak butt long enough.
The design solution to stop it bowing came in a tensile rigging under the table with a spreader arm lifting at the centre. The table stands on simple oak trestles at either end and the tensile rigging serves not only to counteract the bowing moment, but also to pull the joints of the trestles together. By doing this, the table has minimal under structure and interference with diners’ legs.
The log took 6 months to locate. It was the longest planked oak log that any of our sources in the timber trade had ever known at 11m long. To machine the oak we had to cut holes through the walls on either side of our workshop enabling the timber to be fed in through one wall, across the planer in the middle of the workshop and out through the opposing wall.
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Image credits
Lance McNulty