Marble Dining Tables

Table length and seating

The rectangles here run from around seventy five inches to ninety five. The useful way to read those numbers is in shoulder width: each person needs roughly two feet of edge to eat comfortably without touching elbows.

On that basis a seventy five inch table seats three a side comfortably and four at a push; a ninety five inch table seats four a side properly. Adding a place at each end depends on whether the legs or the base allow it, which is a question about the frame, not the top.

Round marble dining tables

A round dining table has no head, which changes the character of a meal: everyone is the same distance from everyone else and conversation stays in one group. The rounds here run from thirty six inches up to forty eight, and the height matters as much as the diameter. The forty eight inch pieces stand at thirty six inches high, which is counter height, rather than dining height, so they take stools, not chairs and work as a kitchen table you perch at, not a formal one you sit down to.

A round also fits a square room better than a rectangle does and leaves the corners free to walk through. A thirty six inch round seats four at its circumference, closely enough that it suits a breakfast table more than a dinner one; a forty eight inch one has room for five or six around its edge, though with stools instead of chairs at the counter height pieces. What a round does not do is scale, since past about sixty inches the middle becomes unreachable, which is why large dining is almost always rectangular.

Extending marble tables

Some of these extend, which in a stone table is a more interesting problem than in a wood one. The mechanism has to carry stone instead of board, and the leaf has to match the top it sits between.

That makes an extending stone table a considered piece and not a default, and it is what a room wants when it is used by a household most of the time and by a gathering occasionally. The alternative, a table sized for the maximum, spends most of the year larger than the room needs.

Daily use on a stone top

A dining table sees more daily use than any other piece of stone furniture in a house, and that is worth factoring into the material choice and not only the size one. What marble does in contact with food and drink is set out on the marble page.

Marble has been used for table tops for a very long time, and the reason is the surface: cool, hard, and unlike anything a wood table gives. The darker and more textured stones in the range suit a table that is worked as well as eaten at, and the pale marbles are chosen for the light they bring to a dining room.

Table and chair sets

A few of these come as complete sets with chairs, which removes the problem of matching a chair height and a chair style to a stone top after the fact.

Chair height matters more with a stone table than with a wood one, because a stone top is thicker than a board and whatever carries it sits below that again. The figure to work from is the clearance from the floor to the underside rather than the overall height, and a set has already resolved it.

A dining table or a made top

This is the piece people most often decide to have made instead of bought, because a dining room usually has a length in mind before it has a table in mind. If the surface is being specified rather than the piece, the stone slab range covers tops cut to size.

The marble furniture page sets out how the four formats divide.