Playing with laying
The craze for ‘tablescaping’ is bringing new drama to dining tables, believes Eleanor Doughty
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ALTHOUGH some might have spent lockdown perfecting their sourdough and yoga positions, others turned to their dining tables in search of new creative possibilities. China, glass and linen—old and new—as well as flowers and a host of found objects offered a chance to reinvent their tables for entertaining in a dramatic way. The practice is known as tablescaping and it’s yet another significant legacy of the 18 months we have spent confined to base.
The term ‘tablescaping’ was first coined by the interior decorator David Hicks in the 1960s. ‘Dad was proud of having invented the word,’ says his son, Ashley. ‘It meant arranging decorative objects on a side table, as a way of showing the pretty stuff you had in your house.’ He had been introduced to the idea of tablescaping by the socialite Winnifreda, Countess of Portarlington. ‘My father also picked up the idea from [the aesthete] Rory Cameron, who had a Palladian house called Villa Fiorentina in Cap Ferrat, France. He went there in his twenties and was fascinated by the way that Rory arranged his objects.’
The term now refers more to dining than side tables and is being fed by a host of new retailers, both actual and virtual. Business has been brisk for founder of Bonadea, Gemma Martinez de Ana, since she opened new premises on the Pimlico Road: ‘It’s been a form of escapism.’ What advice does she give to anyone planning to ‘scape’ a table? ‘I like to mix vintage and antique pieces with new collections,’ reveals Miss Martinez de Ana. ‘In years past, people would buy every piece from a collection, whereas that’s not the case at all now.’
‘Tablescaping is the new dressing up,’ Alice Naylor-leyland declared last year. Her website Mrs Alice sells all the requisite ingredients, including boxed tablescapes. Her four-person ‘alpine berry’ example, which retails at £390, includes napkins, bud vases, glass tumblers, and candle holders, plus decorative objects: rattan reindeer, brown bears and a ‘box of snow’.
She isn’t the only stylish hostess to have been bitten by the table-scaping bug. Last year, the Countess of Belfast launched eponymous interiors brand Oilbhe Belfast. A successful tablescape need not be over-complicated, says Lady Belfast: ‘It can be as big or as small as the individual likes—and can be as simple as laying some flowers from the garden on the table. Seasonal flowers and foliage are the best accessory.’ It isn’t necessary, she adds, to include decorative objects if this isn’t your style: ‘You don’t have to put yellow chicks on your Easter table—you can replicate the same effect with daffodils.’
The popularity of tablescaping speaks not only to the fact that we have been at home with nothing but our crockery to stare at, but the maximalism currently popular in the design world, notes Melanie Johnson, Country Life’s food columnist. For her Country Life tablescapes (see page 102), she has used fabrics from Pierre Frey and Osborne & Little as tablecloths and then layered up step by step. Anything, it seems, is possible: ‘I’ve even got a ceramic croissant from Bonadea.’ And, she adds, why not? ‘The table is a small space that you can go crazy with.’