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In defense of the dining table — and the pleasure found in gathering around a sustainable one.
My mother called it “family time,” and it was non-negotiable. It involved my father, brother, mother, and me sitting down each evening and eating together around the table my mom had picked up for $25 at a garage sale and painted olive green (what can I say; the official color of the ’70s was olive green). The food itself was unspectacular (again, let’s blame the ’70s). But though, at the time, my brother and I muttered and rolled our eyes, as an adult I am deeply committed to the idea of gathering, of breaking bread together, of nourishing body and soul around a communal table.
I hear, however, that the dining table — indeed dining together itself — is out of favor. Just one in three families sits down to eat dinner together, says family therapist Anne Fishel, executive director of the nonprofit Family Dinner Project.
“In the fight to idealize our homes, dining rooms have been a devastating casualty,” reports Southern Living Magazine, concluding that, “Before our very eyes, dining rooms have disappeared.” My friend, a realtor, concurs, noting that her clients prioritize kitchen islands over dining rooms, a culture shift that developers seem happy to oblige.
Not so fast, say I, a stalwart member of the dining table resistance. I have long insisted on “family time” in my own home, enduring the eye-rolls of my own teens, while their friends embraced our communal dinners with sociological curiosity.
And I have long celebrated the dining table — one that is the site of day-to-day meals, of occasions happy and sad and in between, that reaches beyond years and activities, that isn’t so precious that it can’t be used as a surface for constructing a science fair project or a gingerbread house, or for supporting the occasional Zoom call. (Come to think of it, the desk at which I work was once a dining table — a lovely antique nabbed by my mom 50 years ago at a yard sale — that I’ve repurposed and refurbished, including turning a built-in cutlery drawer into a keyboard tray.)
To wit, the first purchase my husband and I made two years ago to furnish our vacation home was, you guessed it, a dining table — specifically a large rectangular table made of reclaimed wood with a (hidden) leaf for expanding. For seating, we purchased one bench (same company, same reclaimed wood) and eight wicker dining chairs, bought secondhand. We demand much of our dining table — including that it comprises sustainability.
Handmade for Experiences
Collins Heavener lives (and farms) with his family on Chappaquiddick off the coast of Massachusetts and handmakes gorgeous dining tables, a process he finds “incredibly gratifying,” he says. “The dining table gets a ton of mileage through all the life experiences. I want a dining table to be used.”
He starts by consulting with the interior designer or homeowner and often takes a field trip to the home to get a sense of the space where the table will reside. He also wants to know how the table will be used: “When you picture a full dinner, how many people do you want to seat? How do you want them seated? Is this family-style or intimate?”
When it comes to choosing the wood, he’s partial to domestic varieties. “Part of that is only wanting to work with what you can find in your backyard (more or less) in New England,” he says. “I don’t want anything that’s taken a long trip overseas.” He recently built a table from a beloved cherry tree that had to come down in the front yard of the client’s home. Collins’s particular favorite is black walnut — “so exceptional to work with,” he says, “and so diverse in character. In terms of colors, it’s purple and chocolate, it’s gray, it’s red, and no two trees are similar.”
When he delivers a table, he says that people often comment that it’s too nice to use. “I say, ‘absolutely trash it, make it yours.’” He points to his own table, which bears the marks of his son’s Hot Wheels … “so many of life’s experiences happen around the dining table. I feel honored to be able to build that piece for whoever’s looking for it.”
Secondhand and First-Rate
I am the reigning queen of secondhand shopping, and easily more than half of our home is furnished with cast-off goods. (I’m fully anticipating the day when a guest notices he’s walking on his own discarded wool rug or sitting on his former sofa.)
The good news about the death of dining rooms is that there’s a lot of orphaned furniture out there. According to Architectural Digest, “Most of the furniture currently cluttering dumps was made within the last 10 to 15 years.” Which means that the good stuff — built to last — is up for grabs.
But it isn’t just the materials themselves that contribute to an item’s sustainability, home decor store owner Sophia Warren points out. “Another aspect is keeping something for a really long time over years of use.”
Bluedot’s Marketplace Editor Elizabeth Weinstein, who lives in midtown Manhattan, spent months scanning online sites — she and her husband love to cook for guests and wanted a vintage table “with a little gravitas.” Finally, she says, she spotted the one — a solid cherry table that seated anywhere from six to 20 people. The table had apparently been in the Danish mission to the United Nations (not far from their midtown apartment), which … who cares if that’s even true? That’s an origin story to share over a meal with guests!
These days, Elizabeth is happily hosting regular dinner parties, including her dad’s 80th birthday celebration, which featured 18 guests. “We have nine extra leaves and 18 extra legs squirreled around our apartment,” she says. “We think we only need nine of the legs, but we’re afraid to get rid of the extras!” She calls it “the table of my dreams.”
Reclaiming the Past
Sophia Warren, COO and creative director at an independent home decor store on Martha’s Vineyard, has clients who value sustainability, and she makes a point of ensuring that her product line supports that. “We have a few dining tables that we keep in stock that are from different reclaimed woods,” she says. “One of the things that I love about them is that they all have this distressing on the finish. As they get more use over time, they just become more beautiful.”
Her business also works with a couple of companies that custom-make tables from domestic hardwoods using U.S.-based mills. But it isn’t just the materials themselves that contribute to an item’s sustainability, Sophia points out. “Another aspect is keeping something for a really long time over years of use,” she says. “Dining on it and [letting the table get] its own strips and nips and grooves and marks, and just life, is another way to look at sustainability.”
Perhaps I can’t convince all of you to give up dining at your kitchen islands, or in the driver’s seat of your car. But for at least some of you, I hope you’ll return to your dining tables and gather there with friends and family. I, for one, remain committed to the dinner party, to getting together with others around tables that bear the marks of lives lived, and meals and friendships savored. Dining tables are out of fashion? Certainly not with me, and cheers to that.
Secondhand shopping tips: Bluedot’s Marketplace Editor Elizabeth Weinstein is something of an online shopping sleuth, able to sniff out the best products at the best price. She suggests table-seekers check out Facebook Marketplace, local “stooping” accounts on social media, Habitat for Humanity’s ReStores, or Elizabeth’s masterstroke discovery, 1stDibs.
Wood for Good
Wood sometimes comes with tags noting a specific certification program. Eco-certifications run the gamut from third-party verified and trustworthy to industry-verified and less so, to almost meaningless. Our own Dear Dot weighed in on certification programs for wood — comparing certifications from the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) and the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI). According to Dot’s research, environmental activists created the FSC certification following the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, while timber industry professionals launched the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI) in 1994 in response to FSC, which they viewed as a threat to their industry. On the surface, both certifications look legit. But while FSC relies on a third-party verification system (this means that qualified outsiders are the ones determining whether requirements are met), SFI allows companies to self-assess. SFI is like relying on your teenager to tell you whether they completed their homework, whereas FSC would call the teacher.
