Round Rattan Coffee Table with Wooden Top

Rattan — the slender, flexible stem of the climbing palm — has been woven into the decorative imagination of the French interior since the eighteenth century, when the taste for chinoiserie and the exotic brought cane furniture and lacquered bamboo to Versailles and the Parisian hôtels particuliers. Its return in the late 1960s and 1970s was something altogether more French in spirit: part of the broad embrace of natural materials — rattan, wicker, rush, jute — that designers and decorators of that decade placed in deliberate contrast to the lacquered and chrome surfaces of the preceding generation.

This round rattan coffee table, with a wooden top and dating from around 1970, exemplifies the quiet confidence of French rattan work at its best. The structure is executed with the precision characteristic of French artisanal furniture-making, the joints tight, the form resolved. The wooden top, in its contrast with the woven texture of the frame, introduces a note of polish and smoothness that prevents the table from being merely rustic: it is a composed piece, not simply a craft object.

At 68.5 cm in diameter and 50.5 cm tall, the table has a generous scale that makes it a genuine living-room centrepiece. Its height — at the upper end for a coffee table — gives it an almost guéridon-like presence, comfortable alongside deep sofas or as a central table in a smaller sitting room arranged in the French manner.

In very good condition. A refined example of French 1970s rattan furniture, at the intersection of artisanal craft and the decade's appetite for natural warmth.