VELASQUEZ TABLE
Design: Herzog & de Meuron
Table T13 — HdM 2025
The Velazquez table showcases what is possible to create with wood, it is a masterpiece in craftsmanship, like the room it was designed for, The Council cigar lounge in the Hotel Les Trois Rois in Basel. An intimate room featuring two magnificent fireplaces facing one another.
The Velazquez emerged from the necessity to have two different table heights for the cigar lounge. The question was: how can you make a table adjustable without a complicated mechanism? The idea was simple, by cutting the base of the table in half in a zigzag pattern, it would increase in height when reassembled "wrongly" and slightly rotated. With this rotation, the spikes would no longer sit neatly in their original slots but instead sit on top of the shorter cutouts.
To accomplish the precision needed for this puzzle to work, a digitally controlled milling process in combination with meticulous manual sanding was required, more than 40 hours. The height adjustability became the form-giving principle. The fact that the base and top are two interlocking crowns is a nice coincidence, since the table was designed for Les Trois Rois.
The Velazquez table is now part of MARTASALA ÉDITIONS' La Magie du Bois collection.
DIMENSIONS
60 x 60 x h40/60 cm
COLOURS
— Brown / Natural
MATERIALS
— Solid Canaletto walnut or solid ash wood, seasoned and dried twice. Machine-processed with five-axis numerical control, it is planed, sanded, glued, clamped and finally finished and edged by hand. More than 40 hours of manual labour.
— Finish: spray-painted 10 gloss.
As wood is a living material that is hygroscopic and the Armory collection is made of solid wood, slight variations or imbalances may occur due to changes in room humidity.
Design Centre, Unit 227,
2nd Floor
South Dome, Chelsea Harbour
London SW10 0XE
Miles de Lange
info@milesdelange.com