Of all the photos of the house I have seen this is one of my favourites. It somehow appeals to me in a quintessentially 19th C. French way. It’s this kind of image that made me choose to buy this house.

Such was the state of repair generally in 2007. Lots of cobwebs, kilos of dust, crumbling plaster…. But where did this strange piece of furniture come from? Who made it? A heavy and warped tongue & grooved hardwood top bolted onto a four-footed base hewn out of a tree stump. The whole thing is connected at the bottom by a giant industrial wing-nut.

I didn’t drag this back to London until Easter 2015 whereupon I set about it with various power tools, brushes, tools and elbow grease.

Method? Well the torso and legs had been long ago painted with some rather nasty rust-proof red paint, I suspect. The top was cracked, weathered and liable to come apart at the merest tug. So I had to flatten and fix as much as possible with some new screws. Before that, I attacked the stump legs with various sanding tools to remove the paint and smooth the surface. I decided I didn’t want to take of all the paint as the random markings left an attractive animal-skin pattern. Several layers of yatch varnish were then applied with fine sanding in-between.

Here’s the ‘before’ photo:

Quite a few sweaty hours later and I think you’ll agree, we have a unique piece of furniture to reinstate on the ground floor.

Surrealistically, it reminds me of a giraffe with a disc where its head should be  – therefore the Giraffe Table. You’ll never see another….