Gather

Authors’ Comment

Gather
This table Gathers its spirit from one of the pieces in the furniture collection built by a member of our family, which surrounds us in our small apartment in the heart of Bucharest. It’s a table with legs made from brass and galvanized steel pipe fittings, and a thick spruce top.
It came out of our need to have a kitchen table — and from the quiet conviction that no table bought, found, or custom-ordered would ever truly respond to our space or to our hidden ambitions, unless we designed and built it ourselves.
At first glance, it seems simple — but its apparent modularity is deceiving. It took us nearly five weeks to Gather all the necessary pieces, and only with the help of a skilled plumber did we find the final fittings.
What followed were countless evenings in the kitchen, threading new joints with almost adequate tools, wrapping everything in hemp and green sealant, and tightening the nuts and fittings so hard that we both suffered from a debilitating muscle soreness for weeks.
Another unexpected challenge was having to Gather our entire workspace at the end of each session — to return it, every single time, to its true function: the kitchen.
The project unfolded in many stages, worked on during the rare and precious moments we happened to have free at the same time, slowly creating the true memory of this kitchen, which until then had felt lifeless — in the absence of a table to start and end a day — but the moment it felt the weight of all our evenings, gestures, tools, fatigue, and laughter, it sprang into being, from coffee to quiet dinners, all sustained by this table, which finally appeared and Gathered us both around it, and now listens patiently to everything we have to say.
We believe that a table, a chair, or any piece of furniture in a home becomes all the more precious when it is made of pieces that have been Gathered throughout a lifetime.