Dining table in Red Gum, Buloke and Ebony
A commission for an Edwardian home. The brief began with an antique refectory table the clients admired — something heavy, grounded, built to anchor a room — and ended here.
A commission for an Edwardian home. The brief began with an antique refectory table the clients admired — something heavy, grounded, built to anchor a room — and ended here.
The top is Red Gum, and that colour is its own. No stain, no tint — just the natural timber under an oil/varnish blend. Beneath the surface, the construction is engineered to manage Red Gum’s tendency to move dramatically with the seasons: a stave core of paulownia strips encased in MDF, wrapped in 3 mm Red Gum veneer. The result is a top that looks and feels like solid Red Gum but stays flat.
The legs follow the same logic. Ebonised Red Gum over paulownia cores — visually massive, structurally stable, and lighter than solid timber would allow. The ebonising is quebracho bark and iron acetate, the same reactive process used on the high-back dining chairs.
The top has end caps of Buloke, reportedly the hardest timber on earth. Between the Red Gum top and the Buloke edging, a continuous strip of true ebony runs the full perimeter — top and bottom — a thin black line that sharpens the transition between the two timbers.
2300 mm long, 860 mm wide, 760mm high. Seats eight comfortably, ten when the evening demands it.
Commissions for dining tables begin at $8,500 depending on size and timber selection.