It’s been years since tables covered by textiles have been showcased. Now they’re back, quite grandly.
After decades in the corners of every room the draped tabled exited in the ‘80s along with shirred fabric on the walls and the ubiquitous apricot and green color scheme of the era. Now, with ‘80s trends returning today, the covered table made a prominent appearance in Elle Décor, where the elaborate apartment of Andrew Gn, a Singapore-born clothing designer featured no less than four of them. Best known for singular beaded, embroidered and otherwise heavily adorned entrance-making clothes, Gn’s tables are uber embellished. This is not your Grandmother’s cotton chintz skirted table with glass on top. It’s high octane French style with a Victorian feel and Asian motifs that yield ideas that can be pulled and adapted.
The apartment itself is highly layered which means tons and tons of pattern, accessories on accessories and lavish displays. It’s a particular look and impossible to source or duplicate and most of us wouldn’t want to since it’s anything but modern. But oh, what details it offers.
In the foyer, an Anatolian or Turkish carpet is used to drape the hall table [top]. Like Caucasian carpets from neighboring Armenia and Georgia, carpets in this style are woven on wool foundations which makes them rather soft and floppy – at least in comparison to a more sturdy Persian carpet woven on cotton. With the softness, comes the ability to drape gracefully to the floor and completely conceal the table beneath, even with a rectangle over rectangle. A flat-woven kilim carpet, some American Indian blankets, and many similar textiles could be used to the same effect – to ramp up a room with wonderful color and pattern that’s lifted off the floor.
A room devoted to smoking (let’s not go there, ok?) has plant-leaf green walls and sapphire velvet tufted sofas both incredibly harmonious with the mellow wood parquet and what looks like an antique table under that lipstick-red table cover. Essentially, it’s a square cloth over a round table so corners point. Specific fabric aside, a table drape like this is basically composed of a solid-color fabric square bordered by 5 to 6-inch patterned banding and finished with ball fringe. The greatest difficulty would be creating neat mitered borders (but it doesn’t appear to be an highly advanced sewing job).
Pedigreed trimming from early 20th century French interior design icon Madeleine Castaing (who died in 1992 at the age of 98) is a prize in any home. This drape is yet another square red topper for a round table in front of a window in the smoking room, keeping the style consistent yet not matching. This banding has a peacock feather motif, popular before World War I, plus bouillon fringe – the same stuff often used on sofas.
Victorian spool or bobbin-leg tables and chairs often were painted black. They suit this sitting area of the bedroom where the wall is hung with antique Chinese embroidered-silk panels. On the table is a small rather thick, fringed textile much like an important doily that serves to protect the table from the weight of the enormous decorative vase by Majorelle. Function over form in this case.
