A Banqueting Table Reimagined

Project Info

This majestic 20-seat banqueting table honours the natural beauty of a felled ancient oak tree, providing a centrepiece for a Grade I-listed country house in West Yorkshire.

With a minimalist form, the Banqueting Table Reimagined has been carefully designed and crafted to provide generous seating for guests of the 10-bedroom hall at Denton Reserve. The table sits at the centre of the home, the house kitchen and the 2,500-acre wider estate; part of a nature recovery project combining landscape regeneration, food production and a unique hospitality and wellness offering. By bringing people together to celebrate nature, the banqueting table manifests the client’s ethos: honouring nature whilst seeking to live sustainably. 

The table is formed from a 269-year-old oak tree that pre-dated John Carr’s Palladian Hall by 30 years, and was felled in 2008. The design was tailored to make use of four vast oak boards, each over 1.3m wide by 3.2m long. Three sequential boards were book-matched side by side to create the monumental tabletop, while a fourth board forms the slab legs, retaining the timber’s live edges on the outside. The boards had been air-dried for 16 years before being hand-flattened, embracing the undulations of the surface to create a perfectly imperfect tabletop.   

A gap detail enables rather than resists the seasonal movement of the timber boards, serving as an ever-changing reminder that wood is an organic, moving material, even when felled, sliced and dried.