It is funny how sometimes different situations in life seem to happen just at the right time. When you read something or a picture appears on your Facebook timeline and it all tends to be connected with our most recent events. It began when my friend Marko asked me to make him a dining table and the only requirement being that it is extendable. Everything else was up to me, even the deadline. One night I sat down and started figuring out a table that would in my opinion be most akin.

At this point I was thinking quite a lot about how people communicate these days, how social media and texting has influenced our conversational habits. I was under the impression that it’s quite difficult to find people with whom to have sincere and honest conversations. I shared these thoughts with few of my friends who talked about having similar observations and would like to see more empathy and sincerity. This made me revisit my values and priorities reminding me all the occasions when Marko and I ended up chatting about the same kind of topics creating this lightbulb moment – maybe I can apply all this into the table. To be honest it is still a table meaning that its main function should remain as it is. I prefer simple lines and tend to keep my furniture minimalistic making it somewhat difficult to add something while maintaining this simple and clean look.

Making an inlay inside the tabletop was one of my first ideas, despite all the other ones, it kind of got stuck in my head. One thing Marko and I talked about was family and the people around us and I was looking for a symbolic sign or image. This explains it pretty well why I chose a silhouette of a tree. The idea is to use the tree as a symbol to remind you what is truly important in life – the ones around us. And I’m not talking just about family, because family isn’t always blood. It’s the people in your life who want you in theirs; the ones who accept you for who you are. The ones who would do anything to see you smile and who love you no matter what.

My idea is to bring people together and enhance sincere and honest communication. To create an environment where family members feel safe to express their joys and concerns without the need to wear a mask. With this table it is just about what value we impose to the piece as a remembrance of how we should behave towards each other.

During the whole process when I was designing and making the table, Marko had pretty much no idea what it is going to look like or even when it’s going to be ready. To be honest, it took me almost a year from the moment we agreed on this project to the day I finally delivered it. I was still working my day job at the time, so Marko actually encouraged me to get my business up and running beforehand and not worry about rushing to build the table. I think it was somewhere a week before I finished it when I wrote this story to describe what was going on in my head and printed it out on a sheet of paper. That way, I could just hand him the page right after taking the table to his home and no further explanations would be needed. Plus, it seemed like a nice idea to accompany the piece with the story of how it came to be.