
Some manufacturers sell furnishing which the purchasers have ordered on a bespoke basis, this has the great advantage of allowing a completely integrated look. It has the great disadvantage of costing an arm and a leg! There is however, a half-way house. Nowadays thanks to modular builds and small batch manufacturing, you can take individual parts of different tables and combine them. You have the advantage of the low price of mass produced ranges added to the advantage of a design which is all yours. This way of providing has gone even further in that a good few retailers now stock striking “combination” designs: it pays them to have unusual attractive designs which they know may only appeal to the more discerning client. Let's look at one of these designs for one item of furniture, console tables with Queen Anne legs.
Now this is unusual. Console tables are for a bang up-to-date functional use. I doubt very much if Queen Anne (1702-1714) asked the under-footman to bring her the remote! Built to fulfill a modern function, console tables have mostly been produced on an almost Scandinavian design basis, functional, simple lines, bare (or worse painted) wood, almost minimalist. That doesn't suit a lot of people. To be blunt, unless you are going to turn your whole home's design into a setting for Pippi Longstocking, these tables are going to stick out like a sore thumb. Furniture retailers have picked up on this. Ikea is great, but it doesn't suit all of us. What the other retailers have done is used the power and flexibility which modern production techniques provide to produce an amalgam of form and function. This means that you can have a fully functional console table that looks like an elegant item of traditional furniture. At Furniture in Fashion we have a range of console tables including glass, high gloss, wooden and marble console tables.