One of us has a small coffee table and thinks it is the single best decision made in that living room in a decade. Another has one too, in a different flat, and thinks it is a glorified coaster that got ideas above its station. This has been going on for months now and nobody’s budging, which tells you something about the object itself, maybe, or just about the people who buy it.
The case for is basically about the room breathing. Take out the big table everyone’s knees used to fight and suddenly there’s floor, actual visible floor, and a small table just sitting there being modest and useful, holding a mug and a laptop and not pretending to be the centerpiece of anyone’s life. The case against is that a laptop, a mug, the remote, someone’s glasses, a half eaten satsuma and whatever mail hasn’t been dealt with yet do not, in fact, fit on a surface the size of a large hardback book, and something always ends up on the floor anyway, so what was the point.
Because let’s be honest about what’s actually on it. Nobody’s coffee table looks like the photo with one vase and a candle.
Ours have a phone charger cable coiled like it’s guarding treasure, a coaster nobody uses because the mug’s already been put down wrong, and at least one child’s sock that has been there so long it’s basically upholstery now. One of these tables has survived a full glass of red wine going over sideways and came out fine, mostly because it’s small enough that the wine had nowhere interesting to go before someone grabbed a tea towel.
The height argument is its own separate war.
You Might Also Like
One of us likes it low, properly low, so it disappears when you’re not looking directly at it. Another wants it closer to sofa cushion height because bending down for a cup of tea forty times an evening is, frankly, exercise nobody signed up for. Neither side has moved an inch on this either.
What everyone agrees on, oddly, is that it looks better with something slightly wrong on it than with nothing at all. A stack of unread post. A single trainer, for reasons lost to time. It reads as lived in rather than staged, and honestly a coffee table with nothing on it looks like it’s waiting for a photographer, not for a Tuesday.
So no, there’s no consensus here, and there probably won’t be one by the time this gets read back next year. One camp will keep buying small ones and loving the extra floor. The other will keep buying small ones, complaining, and buying another small one anyway, which might be the most honest verdict of all.
