Lyre-Base Round Side Table in Figured Teak with Drawer — Regency Manner

About this object

A round lamp table in the Regency manner, built around the most musical motif in furniture: a pierced, carved lyre standing on a fluted urn socle, carrying a drum top of flame-figured teak above four downswept sabre legs finished in brass toe caps. A single frieze drawer with an antiqued brass bail handle is set into the drum — the period's answer for spectacles, letters and the things a bedside accumulates. The top is the table's theatre: book-matched figured teak, polished deep, so the grain moves like smoke under lamplight. The lyre is openwork carving — the frame, scrolled arms and strings are pierced through, not applied to a solid panel — which means the carver works in three dimensions with nothing behind him to hide a slip. The sabre leg beneath is the Regency's great structural idea: a leg that curves down and out in a single sweep places the castor wide of the top's edge, so a tall, small-footprint table resists tipping — the geometry that let lamp tables stand beside chairs for two centuries without bracing. The drum-and-drawer construction is its own quiet trick: a curved drawer front, coopered and shaped to the cylinder, fitted so the drawer line nearly disappears into the frieze. This is the table the period called a lamp table and we'd call the perfect bedside or chair-side: sized for a lamp, a book, a cup, with one drawer for everything else. It pairs natively with the bobbin armchair and the carved fauteuil — the table in these photographs is doing exactly that duty — and works equally between two chairs in a living room or as the hall table that holds keys under a mirror. Polish tone and handle finish adjustable at order; available singly or as a bedside pair.