There is one person on this team who cannot walk past a rattan anything without touching it first, palm flat, like she’s checking a loaf of bread for doneness. We’ve stopped mentioning it. Mostly. It has become a bit, at this point, the sort of thing that gets brought up whenever the rattan end table comes into conversation, which lately is often, because we bought one, and it did not go the way that instinctive little squeeze suggested it might.
The appeal was never in question. It looks like it belongs somewhere with better light than most of our actual living rooms. It’s the kind of object that makes a corner look considered even when the rest of the room is doing absolutely nothing to earn that reputation.
Light enough to move with one hand while holding a mug in the other, which matters more than it sounds like it should, because half our furniture requires two people and a small negotiation to relocate six inches.
Here’s the regret, said plainly, no dressing it up: we bought the compact one, the one marketed as ideal for smaller spaces, and it turned out to be ideal for exactly nobody’s actual side of the sofa. A mug sits on it fine. A mug and a phone and a remote and someone’s glasses do not. The top surface is roughly the size of a side plate, and we found this out the way you find most things out, by living with it for three weeks and quietly resenting a piece of furniture for failing at its one job.
The size thing runs deeper than surface space, though.
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Because it’s small and light and slightly too low for the sofa arm next to it, everyone in the house has developed a specific little swerve when walking through that end of the room, a half step out and around, like there’s an invisible dog lying there. There isn’t. It’s just a table that never quite settled into being the right height for the space, so your body learned to work around it instead of over it. Nobody planned that. It just happened, the way these things do.
What we’d do differently now: go up a size, not down, even in a small room, because a table you can actually use beats one that flatters the floor space and fails at everything else. And measure the sofa arm height first, actually measure it, not eyeball it from across a shop floor while one of us fondles the display model for the third time that visit.
We still like rattan. We still like this one, weirdly, in the stubborn way you like a pet that’s chewed a shoe. We just like it in a bigger size, and in someone else’s corner now, where the swerve has presumably become their problem.
