Tables Altar & Sofa

Shanxi, a family’s main hall, the back wall, ancestor tablets and a stick of incense. Chinese altar tables are among the defining pieces of Chinese furniture, and altar and sofa tables of every sort descend from them. Long and narrow, they held tablets, incense and offerings. The qiaotou’an, the winged altar table, lifts its ends in everted flanges; flat-topped forms carry cloud-carved aprons and spandrels. Most are northern elm and pine from Shanxi and neighboring provinces, eighteenth and nineteenth century, finished in layered lacquer worn back to the grain. Calligraphy tables and painting tables share their spare lines.

From Indonesia and India come rough-hewn and sawhorse-style altar tables in heavy timber; contemporary consoles in walnut, resin and shell inlay take up the same proportions. Behind a sofa, along a travertine hall, under a long horizontal painting, an altar table draws the room’s horizon. Everything else is weather.