Should You Buy a Rattan Side Table? The Team Is Split

There is a rattan side table currently sitting in the office that has caused actual raised voices, which feels like an unhinged amount of feeling to have about a small round table, and yet here we are. The argument isn’t whether to own one. Everyone agrees it should exist. The argument is what it looks like once real life is on top of it, and on that, the room does not agree at all.

Half the office thinks rattan reads as holiday, in the good way, like you’ve smuggled a bit of a beach house into a flat with no beach anywhere near it. The other half thinks it reads as a slightly apologetic wicker basket that got ideas above its station and is now pretending to be furniture. Nobody has moved an inch on this in about four months.

What isn’t up for debate is what actually ends up on it.

Nobody’s table has a single tasteful vase and a candle. One of ours currently has a phone charger, three hair ties, a half drunk glass of water from Tuesday, and a paperback bent so far backwards it’s basically ruined, and somehow all of that looks fine on rattan in a way it would look properly grim on glass. There’s something about the texture that seems to forgive clutter rather than expose it. A glass table shows every fingerprint and every crumb like it’s presenting evidence. Rattan just sort of absorbs the chaos and asks no questions. That’s not nothing.

Where the taste argument comes back with a vengeance is next to anything remotely modern.

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Put it beside a boxy grey sofa and one side of the office says it looks like a mistake, two rooms colliding that were never meant to meet. The other side says that’s the whole point, that the clash is what stops the room looking like a catalogue page nobody actually lives in. Someone described their own living room as “one rattan table away from looking like a rental” and refused to elaborate, which we’ve chosen to accept as devastating and also slightly true.

The build gets one sentence and one sentence only: it’s light enough to move with a foot when your hands are full, which after three moves between us has genuinely mattered more than anything about how it photographs.

Nobody’s changing their mind by the end of this, which feels like the honest way to leave it. Some of us will keep buying rattan every time we see it cheap at a market stall and regret nothing. Some of us will keep saying it belongs in a conservatory that none of us actually own. Both of these positions are currently true in the same building, on the same day, about tables sitting about ten feet apart from each other. We’re not resolving it here. We just wanted you to know the argument exists before you bring one home and start one of your own.