Traditional Coffee Table

Traditional Coffee Table

Looking for a traditional coffee table?

If the style in your home is largely traditional with comfortable chintz covered furniture and soft pile carpets then what you need is a traditional table.

The traditional table is usually rectangular or circular. It is most often made from solid wood such as mahogany or oak. Sometimes you will find traditional tables made from pinewood, also.

Traditionally, coffee tables were meant to sit in front of a sofa. A set of coasters made the coffee table a handy place to put your coffee cup and perhaps the book you were reading.

Although some people say that coffee tables are derived from the Ottoman Empire, and certainly the Turks used small tables when they were drinking coffee, they did not have that name.

Coffee tables, rather than occasional tables, were first designed in Britain in the nineteenth century. Prior to that there were side and end tables, tea tables and occasional tables.

What appears to be the first coffee table was made by a company called Collinson and Lock and designed by E W Godwin in 1868. This appears to be the first time that a small table was specifically referred to as a coffee table.

This was not quite the same as the coffee tables that we know today as it was twenty seven inches high.

Tables were also made in the style of other eras, just as now people will by revivalist art deco furniture. This revivalist tendency is probably the reason why it is possible to find Louis the sixteenth and Georgian style coffee tables.

However, there is no reference to actual coffee tables during those times. Nowadays, it is possible to buy the long, low traditional coffee table in a variety of materials to suit different decorating styles.