Ode to nesting tables
published in 1803.
But Sarah Coffin, a curator at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, suspects that Sheraton was merely codifying a design that had emerged some years earlier. In the 18th century, people commonly arranged furniture for tea drinking, needlework and checkers, later returning it to its place against the walls. Leaving furniture in the center of a room, Coffin said, “would have been considered messy or way too informal.”
My own nesting tables were designed in the late 1920s by German artist Josef Albers, when he taught at the Bauhaus. They are shiny, colorful rectangles on thin oaken legs. In descending order of table size, the tops are pale minty green, goldenrod yellow, semiburnt orange and celestial blue.
It wasn’t until 2004 that the furniture company Vitra put Albers’ design into production, using tinted fiberglass in place of the artist’s painted glass tops. I picked up my set a couple of years later on sale at Vitra’s New York showroom. They are being produced through a partnership between the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in Bethany, Conn., and the Museum of Modern Art Design Store.
Eames Demetrios, an artist who is the grandson of the designer Charles Eames, is a great admirer of my nesting tables. He connects them to Homage to the Square, Albers’ art series begun in 1949 that grew into more than 1,000 variations on concentric patches of color. “There’s poetry in those choices,” Demetrios says of the tables’ notquite-primary hues. “Somehow it comes together just great.”
Which is why Lucy Swift Weber has turned down requests from manufacturers to sell the Albers tables individually. Weber, who leads the licensing and product department at the Albers Foundation, said she “even got into a little bit of an argument” with some of her colleagues, who accused her of standing in the way of commerce. Weber insisted that breaking up the set was not in the spirit of its creator.
She is so right. In Albers’ 1963 book, Interaction of Color, he wrote, “a set of four colors is to be considered — singly as ‘actors,’ together as ‘cast.’ ”
Not, one might say, unlike the Beatles.