We have bought this table four times now as a housewarming gift, which either means we have found the one genuinely safe present in the entire homeware category or means four separate friends have been too polite to tell us they hate it. We choose to believe the former.
The comparison that keeps coming up in the group chat is the old marble effect one against the newer plain white one with the slightly angled legs, and it has basically become our shorthand for the whole argument about what a coffee table is even for. The marble effect one looked expensive from across the room and then chipped at one corner within about six weeks, revealing itself to be, underneath the print, extremely regular white board. The plain one has none of that drama and also none of that betrayal, which one half of us thinks is the whole point of buying white in the first place, stop pretending to be stone, just be a nice white table.
Where it earns its place as a gift, specifically, is knee room, and this is not a small thing when you are furnishing someone else’s flat rather than your own. The marble one had a thick chunky base that looked lovely and ate about four inches of leg space, so anyone sitting on the sofa with their feet up basically had to fold themselves round it like a deck chair. The plainer design has slim tapered legs and an actual gap underneath, so two people can sit across from each other with a laptop balanced on a knee and not be kicking table leg the entire time.
One of us measured this properly, with a tape measure, uninvited, at someone else’s flat warming, and has never been allowed to forget it, but the numbers held up.
Chairs are the other thing nobody thinks about until moving day. Dining chairs pulled up alongside it, for the inevitable moment when six people won’t fit at the actual table, slide in properly under the plain one and just clip the base of the marble one, every single time, at the exact same annoying angle.
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We are still split on whether white is a sensible gift at all given at least one recipient has a dog with visibly muddy paws and zero shame, and half the team thinks giving someone a white anything is a small act of aggression disguised as generosity.
The other half points out that every single recipient still has theirs, unstained, years later, so maybe we are underestimating people.
Either way it photographs well for the thank you text, it clears knees without anyone complaining, and it has never once eaten a chair leg. That is roughly the bar. It clears it.
